People like me
When I was in elementary school, I was the only Jewish kid in my school, and one day out of the blue a classmate on the playground called me “Jew boy.” I was shocked. I knew about antisemitism, about Jewish history, but I’d never experienced this. I froze. I flushed. My eyes welled up. I blurted “What did you say?” She muttered “Nothing,” pretending she hadn’t said it. Perhaps, in her mind, calling me “Jew boy” because I was Jewish was hardly any different from calling me “four eyes” because I wore glasses. It’s possible she was that ignorant. Maybe at that moment, she was thinking “Lighten up, I was just joking.” I remember what I was thinking. I was thinking about people like me being exterminated in gas chambers.
Over the centuries, Jews had been subjected to the most vile types of persecution and had been expelled from one country after another. The Zionist movement (Zion is a biblical Hebrew word denoting Israel, Jerusalem, or a hill in Jerusalem) began as the twentieth century was approaching, and was about Jews in the diaspora following their roots back to their ancestral home to purchase land and establish a refuge from persecution, a sanctuary from which they would not be expelled. The Zionists’ dream of creating a safe haven became all the more imperative in the wake of the Holocaust, in which the vast majority of European Jews were gruesomely annihilated.
That is how I, and I believe most Jewish people, were taught to understand the Zionist movement, and how I think most still perceive it. Others, including Palestinian activists and Israel’s “New Historians,” view Zionism as an example of a European settler-colonial project. America is also seen as fitting the settler-colonial pattern, an academic term which generally refers to newcomers replacing the native society in a particular place, often, but not always, by violent expulsion.
The ADL disputes the settler-colonial characterization of Israel on a number of grounds, but no matter one’s position on that, the traditional view of Zionism as the establishment of a Jewish sanctuary state became so much a part of Jewish culture in the twentieth century (more a part of the culture than attending synagogue) because both religious and nonreligious Jews understood that our Jewish identity makes us all potential targets of persecution. Even if we had no intention of moving to Israel, most of us grokked, intellectually and viscerally, the desire for a safe haven, the idea of one country in the world that would always accept Jews.
Critical patriotism
I still perceive the term Zionism how I learned it, and, as with Americanism, I connect with the nation’s foundational ideals even while I’m dismayed by the far-from-ideal realities.
The ghastly 10/7 attack and the horrifying conflagration in Gaza are the latest and by far deadliest round in a decades-long vicious cycle of violence. This picture of never-ending bloody turmoil is one image of Israel, but I think the image of the nation in the eyes of most Israelis and friends of Israel abroad is that of a democracy, socially progressive in many respects, one of the world’s leading contributors in science, medicine, and technology, and very often a first-responder when other countries are hit by natural disasters.
That is rather like the basically generous view that Americans and friends of America have of our country, despite all the mortifying parts such as systemic racism, endemic poverty, Trumpism, police brutality, mass incarceration, mass shootings, sometimes dubious (or dastardly) interference in the politics of other countries, and sometimes devastating militarism (e.g., the post-9/11 invasions to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baathists in Iraq resulted in tens of thousands of Afghan civilians being killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians being killed, and many millions in both countries being displaced).
The generous view of America — or of Israel — may be based on inspiring examples (of, for instance, good works, grit, heroism) or it may be an aspirational view, a determination to reify the lofty words penned in the nation’s founding documents. It’s not unusual for people to feel a strong and genuine connection to a country and at the same time to express blunt criticisms of its leadership and society. Such dissent has been called critical patriotism. For example, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed America as “my beloved nation” even as he inveighed against the immorality of the war in Vietnam and racial and economic injustice at home.
The positive framing of Israel holds that the country is an oasis of freedom in the region, a nation established as a sanctuary state for Jews but where Arabs are active in politics, serve in the government, in parliament, and on the courts; and while military service is mandatory for Jews, thousands of Arabs volunteer to serve. These examples (and similar examples regarding Native Americans in the U.S.) could also be viewed critically as another side of settler-colonialism: voluntary assimilation or accommodation. Still, we should be careful not to disregard people’s agency and their ability to hold more than one view at the same time. Rhoda Kanaaneh, a Palestinian-American anthropologist who wrote a book about Arabs voluntarily serving in the Israeli military, noted that she met up with one Arab Israeli soldier who was also an activist in a Palestinian NGO; he argued that serving in the military “allows him to speak ‘with a full mouth’ against Israeli policies of discrimination.”
Hopefully enough Israelis have had it with Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right, as polls so far indicate, but — given that Israel’s reactionary strain is no less prominent than America’s and given that 10/7 was no less traumatizing to Israel than 9/11 was to America — when I recall our own history in this regard, I’m hesitant to be confident: even after George W. Bush failed to take seriously warnings of an imminent attack, and even though he instigated a war with a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 and had none of the purported WMD, and despite the massive number of casualties, and despite the photos of prisoners being tortured and dehumanized by U.S. soldiers — despite all those things (and many others) to his discredit, our “war president” won the popular vote and another four years in office. (Here’s an informative CNN article about Israel’s parliamentary election system: “How a rule change helped Netanyahu win Israel’s elections.”)
To be clear
Because I’m accustomed to the usage of the term “Zionism” as meaning support for Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland and sanctuary state (which is not the only historical usage of the term but a very common one) when I hear activists use a phrase like “Zionism is racism,” it does not come across to me as merely the denouncement of particular policies and practices.
“Zionism is racism” comes across to me as an absolutist meme which paints with a broad brush all Israelis (Jews and non-Jews alike) who feel allegiance to their country, and everyone abroad who supports the idea of a Jewish homeland and haven in Israel; the meme implies that holding such a view means one cannot oppose denigration, subjugation and oppression of Palestinians and, indeed, must favor these things. Such a generalization contradicts the very idea of critical patriotism.
Of course, language is dynamic and we can’t control which usages gain currency (Jews in Israel for example will more often use the word “Zionist” in a partisan political sense than Jews abroad would, akin to the difference in America between the words “Republican” and “republican”). Nonetheless, if you use the Z-words it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind how they are commonly heard, particularly by Jewish folks in the diaspora, where the words originated.
To my ear, when people equate Zionism with racism, it sounds like when people equate Islam with intolerance or terrorism. It makes me cringe.
Zionism and Judaism aren’t the same thing, but because they are so closely correlated, memes which negatively stereotype Zionists are not only bound to be interpreted by a large fraction of the Jewish population as negatively stereotyping Jews, but also — in a world which has a long history of hatred and violence toward Jews — have the very real potential to be inflammatory.
Obviously, everyone will make their own decisions about Z-word usage. Personally I wouldn’t (for example) use Zionism as a shorthand for right-wing Israeli nationalism or Zionists as a shorthand for Israeli religious extremists. I’d opt for clarity over concision.