Zionism has become a 'bad' word. It is anything but.
Subscribers to Zionism are, for no good reason, made to feel dirty, defective, and controversial. Now more than ever, we must reclaim the term and — more importantly — its meaning, value, and purpose.
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This past weekend, I was at a Los Angeles bar when someone (a non-Jew) asked me, as we were talking about Israel, “Are you a Zionist?”
What especially bothered me was that his tone implied the term “Zionism” seems dirty, defective, and controversial.
Considering all the “pro-Palestinian” (i.e. anti-Jewish) content that astronomically outnumbers “pro-Israel” content on social media and across much of the mainstream news, I understood that this man was not ill-intentioned. He had just been (unknowingly) brainwashed into thinking that being a “Zionist” is something rotten.
Of course, it is not.
Zionism, in the simplest-possible terms, is a belief in Jewish self-determination after literally thousands of years of unequivocal proof spanning many countries that Jews are endangered when living in non-Jewish societies. That is the entire definition of Zionism. Anyone who tells you otherwise is uneducated, ignorant, naive, or consciously lying to advance their own perverted agenda.
Notice how there is no mention of Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims in this definition. That is because there was never a mainstream Zionist masterplan to eradicate Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims from British-era Palestine, which preceded the State of Israel’s founding in 1948. The Jews truly emigrated in peace from Europe, other parts of the Middle East, North and South America, and even places like India and Africa to take part in the Zionist dream: Jewish self-determination in our historically accurate indigenous homeland.
In other words, Zionism in every sense of the term is a liberal concept predominantly based on decolonization, or the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas.
Hence why, before the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the area was called “British-era Palestine” (also known as “British Mandatory Palestine”). Beginning in 1918, Brits managed the territory. Before then, the Ottomans ruled it. Unfortunately for all the “pro-Palestinians” and their revisionist history, the Palestinians in and of themselves never ruled “Palestine” — in large part because they never wanted to.
For instance, prior to 1948, many Palestinians wanted to be part of “Greater Syria.” And the name “Palestine” was created not by the Palestinians themselves; the term was first used to denote an official province around 135 CE, when the Roman authorities, following the suppression of a Jewish revolt against their antisemitic ways, renamed the province of Judaea to “Syria Palaestina” to spite the Jews living there.
With that said, there have always been people living in “Palestine” — but it was always ruled by foreign agents who largely considered the territory insignificant according to their own arithmetic, and thus paid little attention to it.
Zionism emerged in the late 19th century as a response to centuries of Jewish persecution — including but not limited to devastating pogroms, second-class citizenships, and the rise of nationalist movements across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
The term was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890, and the movement was later formalized by Theodor Herzl who is often considered the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl’s seminal work, Der Judenstaat (German for “The Jewish State”), published in 1896, argued for the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state as a solution to the endless antisemitism that Jews faced in countless countries during thousands of years, following our exile from the biblical Land of Israel.
Thus began the increasing immigration of Jews to Ottoman-era Palestine in the 1800s and even more so in the 1900s, well before the Holocaust. The family of my Israeli cousin Etty arrived from Germany to Tel Aviv in the early 1930s, and I have met many Israelis whose grandparents and great-grandparents lived in Israel well before it was officially the State of Israel starting in 1948.
Many Jews arrived to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, and some as late as the 1970s; for example, the Ethiopian Jews. I arrived in 2013 under Israel’s “right of return” law, passed in 1950, whereby Jews, their spouses, and the children and grandchildren of Jews have the legal right to immigrate to Israel and automatically become citizens (barring extreme scenarios, such as those who have a criminal record in their current country of residence and those who pose a public health threat to Israel).
Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, the Jews who arrived to Ottoman-era and then British-era Palestine often “legally” purchased land with cash from Arab and Palestinian landlords. I put “legally” in quotation marks because legality in Europe, for instance, was not the same as legality in the Middle East.
Allow me to paint a picture for you: Let’s say, in 1898, a group of Jews arrive in Ottoman-era Palestine with cash, identify a plot of land that they like, then find its Palestinian or Arab landlord, and offer to pay him cash, 100-percent upfront, for his land. The landlord agrees, takes the money, and declares the sale to be complete. These Jews are now this piece of land’s owners.
However, there are local (Arab) peasants living on this land. Perhaps they farm it and live for free, perhaps they are slaves to the previous landlord, or perhaps they pay rent. Either way, it is their home according to them, even if they are not the “owners” of this particular land.
But the landlord sold the land without consulting them. He might have told the peasants about the sale directly before or after the transaction, or he might have told the Jewish buyers to tell the peasants that someone purchased the land from the landlord and now, suddenly, they need to leave their homes.
This was not true for every single Palestinian living in Ottoman-era and British-era Palestine in the 1800s and 1900s before the Jews declared their independence in 1948, but it could have happened enough times to the point where some Palestinians started claiming that “the Jews stole our land.” At the same time, the Jews contended that they “legally” purchased the land (which, one could easily argue, they did).
And here we have the makings of two diametrically opposed narratives in which both sides are sort of right and sort of wrong.
There are many other stories about Ottoman-era and British-era Palestine. For instance, when Jews arrived to the region in the 1800s and 1900s and purchased available land, they rehabilitated it both for farming and for living, thus bringing far more socioeconomic value to the region and raising the quality of life for all residents.
For whatever reason, some local (Jew-hating) Arabs raided farms and settlements; irrigation canals and crops were regularly sabotaged; sanitary conditions were poor; and malaria, typhus, and cholera were rampant.
Ardent Zionist Dr. Israel Kligler, a microbiologist, is credited with malaria eradication in the region during the 1920s, which ironically resulted in a major increase in the Arab’s population there. Local Arabs said that Zionists made the land “livable” and as many as 60,000 Arabs subsequently immigrated to British-era Palestine to take advantage of new work opportunities provided by the growing population.
As exponentially more Jews — fleeing virulently antisemitism-infested Europe and the Middle East — continued to immigrate to the region before the Jews’ declaration of independence in 1948, the notion of Jewish self-determination became increasingly foreseeable. Dominant thinking about Zionism could be described in three ways leading up to the founding of the Jewish state:
Practical Zionism – Firstly there is a need in practical terms to implement Jewish immigration to the biblical Land of Israel and settlement of the land, as soon as possible, even if a charter over the Land is not obtained.
Labor Zionism – a desire to establish an agriculturist society not on the basis of a private-bourgeoisie society, but rather on the basis of moral equality
Cultural Zionism – The fulfillment of the national revival of the Jewish People should be achieved by creating a cultural center in the biblical Land of Israel and an educative center to the Jewish Diaspora, which together will be a bulwark against the danger of assimilation that threatens the existence of the Jewish People.
Again, nothing here about Zionism has anything to do with Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians. In fact, the Zionists were willing to in good faith negotiate and share the land with the local Arabs (i.e. the Palestinians), two states for two peoples.
The first iteration of this came circa 1936 as part of the Peel Commission. There were many other attempts by the Jews in 1947 and thereafter. Each time, the Palestinians profusely refused to accommodate a Jewish state in the Jews’ indigenous homeland and would not even negotiate.
The Palestinians, aided by nefarious regional actors, promised relentless, violent, genocidal conflict until they received exactly what they wanted: all of the land for themselves — you know the drill by now: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” — even as Jews justifiably owned a lot of the land.
These antisemitic attitudes and behaviors lasted through the 1990s with then-Palestinian leader (and mega-terrorist) Yasser Arafat’s disingenuous entry into the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords “peace” process that did not produce any peace and only fostered more antisemitic attacks by Palestinians against Israelis, culminating in the traumatic Second Intifada (a violent Palestinian uprising) from 2000 to 2005 which Arafat proudly sanctioned.
Before the Second Intifada — during which Palestinians habitually committed heinous terrorism against Israelis, mostly citizens — there were no separation barriers between Israel and Gaza and Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. Both Palestinians and Israelis will tell you that Palestinians would regularly come into Israel and Israelis into Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank with relative ease.
But after Palestinians purposely killed Israeli children, embarked on suicide bombings on public buses in Israel, and a host of other heinous terrorism during the Second Intifada, Israel built separation barriers to keep their people safe. I’d hope your country would do the same given the circumstances.
Thus, anyone who claims that Gaza is an “open-air prison” or that the Palestinians in the West Bank “do not have freedom of movement” — all that might be true, but it is an obvious and exclusive byproduct of the Palestinians’ decades-long, nonstop antisemitic attacks against Israel and Israeli civilians, not because Israel is an “apartheid” state that engages in “ethnic cleaning” and “genocide” as the twisted, historically inaccurate Palestinian “narrative” wants you to believe.
Hence why Zionism, a term with deep historical and cultural roots, is often misunderstood and even vilified in contemporary discourse. And the primary reasons for this unfortunate reality are as follows: First, there has been an inherent anti-Israel (really, anti-Jewish) bias baked into mainstream media dating back to at least the 1960s (and probably well before then). As we like to say in the Jewish world: “No Jews, no news.”
The second reason is that the Soviets beginning in the 1960s — and more recently the Qataris and the Iranians — have helped the Palestinians craft an intellectually dishonest, historically inaccurate, gaslighting-filled narrative whereby Palestinians are angels and “Zionists” are devils.
Before Arafat started working with the Soviets in the 1960s, for example, his message was pretty frank: “We want to exterminate the Jews who ‘stole’ our land.” But the Soviets told him that these words had been falling on deaf ears because the West was still entrenched in a ton of guilt for watching as the Holocaust happened. So, the Soviets convinced Arafat to change the Palestinian narrative from extermination to “liberation” and “resistance” against the “colonizing” Jews.
This disingenuous, untruthful change in messaging worked like a charm, and today Zionism is considered a “bad word” for precisely these reasons.
Still, many people will point to Israel’s “violent settlers” as their main argument about why Zionism has become corrupted. This is a load of crap. Israel’s “violent settlers” are less one percent of the entire Israeli population. Some of them are law-breaking criminals who must be prosecuted as such, but overemphasizing them or painting all of Israel with their brush is wildly misguided. This would be like me claiming that Americans are a detestable people and America a despicable country that has no right to exist because of the Ku Klux Klan.
Others argue that Israel’s current “ultra-Right-wing” government has perverted Zionism. To this I say: If you only like democracy when you approve of the outcomes, then you are the problem, not Israel’s vibrant democracy. This “ultra-Right-wing” government was democratically elected (even though the elections were close) and those who truly appreciate democracy understand that we have to live with its outcomes until the next Israeli elections, or until the current parliamentary coalition is disbanded.
The reality is that Zionism has, over time, been distorted into a “bad word” in certain circles due to a transformation which is not merely a semantic shift but a reflection of broader geopolitical, sociopolitical, and ideological conflicts that have nothing to do with Israel and the Jewish People.
One episode, from 1975, is a prime example: The increasingly antisemitic United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism. Although this resolution was revoked in 1991, the falsified idea that Zionism is inherently racist or colonialist has persisted.
In contemporary discourse, “Zionism” has become a term loaded with negative connotations. It is often used pejoratively and associated with imperialism, apartheid, and oppression. This transformation is partly the result of successful propaganda campaigns by groups opposed to Israel’s existence and partly due to a lack of understanding of what Zionism actually entails.
Critics of Zionism often conflate the movement with the actions of the Israeli government, failing to recognize the diversity of thought within the Zionist movement. Just as there are different forms of nationalism, there are different forms of Zionism, ranging from the religious to the secular, from the expansionist to the peace-oriented. However, in many discussions, Zionism is reduced to a monolithic and malevolent force, ignoring the legitimate aspirations for self-determination that underlie the movement.
One of the most troubling aspects of the vilification of Zionism is the double standard applied to Jewish nationalism compared to other forms of nationalism. While many nationalist movements are celebrated as expressions of self-determination, Zionism is often singled out for criticism. This discrepancy is particularly glaring when one considers the history of Jewish suffering and the legitimate Jewish fears that drive the desire for a Jewish homeland.
Moreover, the singling out of Zionism for condemnation often ignores the complex realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is frequently portrayed as the sole aggressor, while the actions of Palestinian groups, including terrorist organizations, are downplayed or justified. This imbalance contributes to my and many others’ belief that so-called “anti-Zionism” is really just a cover for antisemitism, particularly when it is accompanied by implicit and explicit calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.
The vilification of Zionism has had a profound impact on Jewish communities worldwide. Jews who identify as Zionists often find themselves ostracized in “progressive” spaces, where Zionism is equated with racism and oppression. This has led to a growing sense of alienation among Jews who feel that their identity and historical experiences are being dismissed or distorted.
And many social justice movements which Jews have fervently championed are now excluding Jews who, like approximately 90 percent of Jews worldwide, consider themselves “Zionists” in some form or fashion. There are many examples of this reality, but the most obvious one seems to be the so-called #MeToo movement, spawning the unfortunate-yet-accurate spinoff: “Me Too, Unless You’re a Jew.”
In some cases, the hostility towards Zionism has led to physical violence against Jews, as seen in the rise of antisemitic attacks in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. The conflation of Zionism with all Jews has made Jewish communities vulnerable to backlash whenever tensions flare up in the Middle East. This has created a chilling effect, where Jews feel they must choose between their support for Israel and their place in “progressive” and “liberal” movements.
Given the misunderstandings and distortions surrounding Zionism, there is a need to reclaim the term and educate others about its true meaning. Zionism is fundamentally about the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, a right that is enshrined in international law and recognized for all other nations. Criticizing specific policies of the Israeli government is valid, but it should not be conflated with a rejection of the Jewish right to a homeland.
The transformation of Zionism into a “bad word” is a reflection of the broader challenges facing Jewish communities and the State of Israel in the 21st century. It is a term that has been distorted and weaponized, often used to delegitimize Jewish self-determination. To counter this, it is crucial to reclaim Zionism’s true meaning and promote a nuanced understanding of its history and goals.
Zionism is not inherently racist or colonialist; it is a movement that arose in response to centuries of persecution and the desire for a safe and secure homeland for the Jewish People. By engaging in informed and direct dialogue, we can challenge the misconceptions surrounding Zionism and foster a more balanced and just discourse about the question of Jewish rights in the world.
Good piece. A Basic Reason why Zionism is defamed.... some people do not like to see strong Jews. This is the actual transactional reason why Anti-Zionists are Anti-Semitic, and Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Well, We are now strong. F*** them. Jews are now strong. Get used to it.
Excellent article; however, if I may humbly suggest, you forgot to include the fourth type of Zionism. That is, "Economic Zionism". You practice this type of Zionism by visiting Israel, staying among the population, taking part in its culture, and, of course, spending money on Israeli goods. I try to do this once a year and love it.