The Great Lie About Zionism

The Jews did what dozens of other stateless peoples did — but only our independence is called “colonialism.”

photo: Johannes Schenk/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer, speaker, and social media influencer.

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

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In 1825, a young rabbi named Yehuda Alkalai settled in Zemun, a garrison town on the Danube, just across the water from Belgrade.

Around him, the Ottoman world was breaking apart. The Serbs had risen against the Ottoman Empire and were winning self-rule. The Greeks were fighting the same empire for independence and would soon have it.

Alkalai watched his neighbors free themselves and began to preach something Jews were not supposed to say out loud: Stop waiting for the messiah. Buy land in the Land of Israel. Petition the sultan. Go home, the way the Serbs were going home.

He wrote it in books and carried it to Jewish communities across Europe, decades before the word Zionism existed.

The gabbai (an official or assistant who helps organize and run religious services) of his synagogue, the man who unlocked the door first and locked it last, was named Shimon Leib Herzl. His grandson was named Theodor.

Historians still argue over how much of the rabbi’s teaching reached the gabbai’s grandson, and a few weeks ago the story surfaced again: Israel exhumed Shimon Leib and his wife Rivka from the Jewish cemetery in Zemun and reburied them on Mount Herzl, beside the grandson who turned a Balkan rabbi’s argument into a modern state.

I think about Zemun in almost every conversation I have with Palestinians about peace. I have many of them, some public, most private, over coffee and over text. The people I talk to are serious, but many of the public conversations hit the same wall. Before we can discuss the future, I am asked to accept a version of the past: that Zionism was a European colonial and imperial project, an outpost of an empire planted in the Middle East, and that everything since follows from that original crime.

Herzl did write about “colonization,” though the word carried none of the historical and theoretical baggage it does today. It was a synonym for founding new communities.

An organization called the Jewish Colonisation Association existed. In 1948, roughly 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and their descendants carry that inheritance today. My argument is not with these facts, but with whether they add up to a narrative of colonialism as it’s discussed today in academia.

My answer is that they don’t. That’s why I started this essay with Zemun.

Zionism was born in a specific historical moment, and it wasn’t during the age of empire, but at the beginning of that long era’s undoing. The Serbs and the Greeks broke from the Ottomans first. Then World War I killed four empires at once: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman.

Out of the wreckage came the map of Europe we know: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, the Baltic states — more than 20 countries where empires had been. Every one of them was a small nation that had lived under imperial rule and demanded to govern itself.

They also won their independence the same way. Each small national movement allied itself with an empire that opposed the empire ruling over it. The Serbs and Greeks leaned on Russia and Britain against the Ottomans. The Czechs, the Poles, and the Finns leaned on the Allies against Vienna, Berlin, and Petrograd.

The peoples of the Levant tried the same strategy. The Maronite Christians sought French backing, the Armenians sought Russian backing, and the Jews sought British backing. Winning the promises of a rival empire during a great-power war was the standard strategy of every stateless people of that century.

So when the Zionist movement made its alliance with Britain, it was using the same strategy as the Czechs, whose alliance with the Allies produced Czechoslovakia. Nobody calls Czechoslovakia a British colony. The rabbi in Zemun had already named the model a half century earlier.

The Serbs did this, the Greeks did this. The Jews can do this.

The word “colonization” deserves the same scrutiny. A colonist is an extension of a metropole. The settlers of Australia had London behind them and London to return to. The settlers of Algeria had Paris. The Jews had no capital behind them and no country to return to. Statelessness was the problem the movement existed to solve.

There is an even closer parallel, and it rarely enters these debates. In the 17th century, the Persian Empire emptied much of Eastern Armenia of Armenians in its wars with the Ottomans. When Russia defeated Persia in 1828, the Treaty of Turkmenchay included a provision for resettling Armenians back into the Caucasus, and tens of thousands returned within a few years under Russian protection, with more following from Ottoman lands.

A dispersed people came home to a land it had been driven from, under the sponsorship of an empire. Nobody calls Armenia a settler-colonial state. The Armenian return is treated as what it was: the repatriation of a nation. The Jewish return belongs on the same page of the same book.

The Levant was denied Europe’s ending. The dominant national movements of the region, Arab and Turkish, refused self-determination to the smaller peoples living among them. That refusal has now lasted a century. The Kurds number 30 to 40 million and remain the largest stateless nation on earth. The Assyrians, who had a claim to a homeland after World War I, now live overwhelmingly in diaspora. The Maronites Christians of Lebanon went from a majority in the 1932 census to roughly a third of the electorate today, as Arabs took power.

The Jews, another ancient indigenous people of the Middle East, are on the same list, with one difference: The Jews won the war that Arab armies initiated to prevent them from having sovereignty.

The displacement that war produced sits within a century of displacements that followed post-imperial wars. The Greek-Turkish exchange of 1923 uprooted 1.6 million people and was ratified at Lausanne as international law. The partition of India in 1947 displaced millions more. After World War II, 12 to 14 million Germans were expelled from Central and Eastern Europe. And in the same war of 1948, around 850,000 Jews were driven from the Arab world, from communities older than Islam.

My grandmothers, both teenagers, were two of those 850,000. Two refugee populations left one conflict. One was absorbed, without a camp remaining anywhere. The other was deliberately kept stateless by the Arab states, and denied citizenship by Jordanian and Lebanese policy, so the wound would stay open.

Every history on this list is a tragedy. Together, they show what the collapse of empires did everywhere. And everywhere else, the wars eventually stopped.

Here is where my conversations get hard, and where they get honest. Arab nationalism is valid, just like any other ethnic group. What I find myself saying, in some form, every time, is this: If we are going to talk about imperialism, then I want to talk about all of it.

The reason there has never been a war between Palestinians and Israelis alone, why it was five Arab armies in 1948 and coalitions of states in 1967 and 1973, and why the war today is financed by Iran and Qatar, is this: States that use the Palestinian cause the way empires have always used smaller peoples — as instruments.

The imperial power in this story exists. It has spent a hundred years fighting the self-determination of the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Maronites, and the Jews. Anti-imperialism that calls the very groups fighting it “oppressors,” is itself a colonial fiction.

Which brings me to the question underneath every one of these conversations: What does peace look like from here?

The answer depends entirely on which history you believe.

If Israel is a colony, peace will look like decolonization. In Algeria, the French went back to France. But seven million Israeli Jews have no France. Half of them descend from the Jews of Baghdad, Sana’a, Casablanca, Tunis, and Tripoli, refugees of this region with nowhere else in this region to be sent. The one-state answer usually arrives here: South Africa, equal citizenship, nobody leaves.

That answer always comes with a second demand, a heritable right of return for millions of descendants, and together the two mathematically dissolve the world’s only Jewish state. A people that lived through the 20th century will read that outcome as departure by other means, and will refuse it, forever. A frame that can only offer Palestinians demands which can never be met is a frame that promises them a peace that can never arrive. It has kept that promise for decades.

If Zionism is what the record shows — one small nation’s independence movement among the dozens of its era — then this conflict belongs to a category with known endings. Europe’s post-imperial wars were as bitter as this one, with displacement on the same scale, and they ended where the empires stayed dead. Europe’s one war today, in Ukraine, began the moment an empire tried to come back, and it proves the rule. The wars of small nations end when the empires behind them lose.

The Levant’s empire has an address in Tehran, and the coalition it funds has spent decades making sure no small people of the region govern itself in peace. Defeating it is the actual work.

In 2018, the presidents of Serbia and Israel together opened a street in Zemun named for Theodor Herzl. It sits near the street named for Rabbi Alkalai, in the town where a Jewish rabbi watched Serbs become free and concluded his own people could be next.

Two small nations of the old Ottoman world, putting up street signs for each other’s founders — that is what the far side of this kind of war looks like, and it is the most ordinary thing in Europe.

What stands between the Levant and that ordinariness is a hundred-year imperial project with present-day funding. The first step toward peace has always been calling it by its name.

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