Key words: Zionism

Zionism is often described simply as the expression of the Jewish right to self-determination. Nothing could be more misleading. 

Zionism emerged as a political movement among Jews in late-nineteenth-century Europe in response to antisemitism and as a movement of liberation from it. But it was preceded as a political idea among Puritan Christians who saw the return of Jews to Israel as necessary to fulfil biblical promises. Christian Zionists in their millions are an extremely powerful part of the Israel lobby in the USA today.

Late-nineteenth-century  Zionists, echoing the beliefs of other national movements of the time, argued that Jews were a national as well as a religious grouping with a right to a homeland. But unlike other people seeking nationhood, Jews did not inhabit one particular country and Zionism ended up choosing the Biblical ‘land of Israel’ as the focus of its territorial ambition.

While Zionists adopted the mantra of ‘a land without people for a people without a land’, they knew full well that Palestine was home to Arabs who had lived and worked there for generations. The original strategy was to buy land off absentee landlords, displacing the occupants so that Jewish settlers could move in. But Zionist leaders knew – and were candid about it to themselves –that ‘transfer’ of many existing inhabitants would be required to achieve a Jewish majority in the state they planned. 

Most Jews were not attracted to Zionism before the horrors of Nazi persecution, for a number of reasons, including the following.

First, Zionism was determinedly secular. For religious Jews, yearning for ‘Zion’ was spiritual not material. Many believed (and still do) that it is blasphemous for Jews to attempt to return to their prophesied promised land until the messiah comes.

Second, Jews feared being accused of dual loyalty if they identified with a country other than the one they lived in. Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet at the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, opposed it on precisely these grounds, calling it antisemitic, ‘a mischievous political creed’.

Third, most Jews wanting to emigrate saw the USA as their promised land. 

Finally, the view of those who chose not to emigrate was expressed well by the Polish Jewish Bund’s philosophy of doikayt (Yiddish for hereness): ‘where we live, that is our home’. Antisemitism had to be fought alongside other racisms, not fled from.

Zionism has taken many forms historically: spiritual, liberal, socialist, and more. Only one form has traction today: actually existing Zionism is the reality of an ethno-nationalist, expansionist, genocidal, Jewish-supremacist, apartheid state of Israel. 

Could it have been otherwise? Whatever their individual motivation, Jews emigrating to Palestine were inevitably perceived by the people already living there as what they were: settlers, part of a settler-colonial movement. Over time, they have become ever more so.

Current attempts to present Zionism as an essential part of Jewish identify, making criticism of it by definition antisemitic, are little more than a strategy to stifle dissent and to enforce a conformity on Jewish communities which are increasingly fragmenting in horror at what Israel is doing in the name of Jews worldwide.