IF YOU’RE GOING TO OPINE ONLINE ABOUT ZIONISM, AT LEAST UNDERSTAND WHAT THE WORD MEANS

I was staying away from this topic, figuring other people had said plenty, until I saw a post about how politicized the “Zionism” Wikipedia article had become, with teams editing and counter-editing it to conform to current political agendas. Within days, I also listened to a public radio show in which a complete misunderstanding of genetics was combined with a misunderstanding of post-colonial theory (with the word Nazi thrown around a lot) and separately treated to a polemic about how anything other than an embrace of Trump’s war in Iran stems from antisemitism.

This speaking around the issues and stoking of anger threatens to derail everything from the 2028 US presidential primaries to any attempt to combat the rise in bigotry and hatred in this country to any analysis of the Iran war more sophisticated (and more to the point, actionable) than “America Great!” or “Colonialism Bad!”

My brand is explaining and humanizing as a prelude to real conversation. Lots of people are doing that online, but few are reading anything that doesn’t conform to their preexisting biases. So, I’ll personalize the issue. You aren’t going to read about me anywhere other than here, and if you’ve read this far, you are at least interested in my analysis and/or how it underlies the fiction I write (the handful of times I’ve tackled Middle East issues, that is).

I lived in Israel between 1986 and 1987 as a junior year overseas, which I spent studying history and political science and trying to understand the region. I came back with the conviction that the situation was unstable, the hatreds were intolerable, and everything was about to explode. I gave exactly one public talk where I made this argument. Most of the listeners pooh-poohed what I had to say. A few months later, the first intifada proved me correct. I haven’t been back to Israel since, but I’ve done my best to keep up with the issues.

Both on this blog and in my fiction, I’ve addressed the Middle East in various ways, so I want to keep this post focused on Zionism. What is it? Well, during the time I was in Israel, the standard Israel response was that if you are a Jew, you should immigrate to Israel, and you can’t call yourself a Zionist unless you intend to do so. Get some skin in the game or don’t bother us.

I stayed in the US, so by that definition, I was not a Zionist.

I considered moving to Israel. I enjoyed my interactions with my extended family there. I appreciated being in a country that took freedom of the press seriously: there were eight daily newspapers available at virtually every newsstand. They ranged from Marxist to libertarian in orientation, and people bought them and read them. At the time, in the US, if you wanted to read the news, you had choices ranging from a capitalist bias that embraced imperialism, racism, and religious fanaticism to a capitalist bias that was willing to support an equal right for women to be exploited by business interests (as long as these women were heterosexual), valorized refraining from littering (while failing to question the right to burn fossil fuels), and had finally moved away from overt public support of “segregation academies.” The latter sources were called “liberal.”

I also appreciated being in a country where “intellectual” was not a pejorative.

My decision not to immigrate was both political and personal. At the age I was, immigration would have come with an obligation to serve in the military. I had come to view the treatment of the Palestinian people and the head-in-the-sand attitude regarding their national rights as something I couldn’t defend, and I certainly couldn’t shoot anyone in its defense. To me, immigrating would have been an endorsement of the Likud (the party in power) strategy of putting off dealing with core issues until “facts on the ground” were established that would render a two-state solution impossible.

On a personal level, my relatives in the sciences told me that American degrees were more respected than Israeli ones, so if I ultimately wanted a position at an Israeli university, I should do my Ph.D. at an American one. While pursuing that degree, I married someone who desired to stay in the US. And although the Oslo process teased the possibility of Israel pursuing policies I could support, the bullet that killed Rabin set the country off on the trajectory that led to what we see today.

Consequently, I have lived my life in the US, and by an Israeli definition of Zionism, I would not be considered a Zionist.

American Jews in the 20^th century operated with a very different definition of Zionism. To most, Zionism meant that like every other national grouping in the world, Jews had a right to a physical refuge from persecution and a cultural center. Jews originated in Israel; genomic evidence supports a Middle Eastern origin for both Jews and Palestinians, with considerable introgression of European DNA into both populations, despite propaganda promulgating outright lies about the data. (I’ve read a lot of the papers, and one thing I do claim as a former geneticist is the ability to read the scientific literature.) Early 20^th-century Great Power politics could be manipulated in support of a Jewish state in Israel and not toward a location anywhere else on the planet. Consequently, to 20^th-century Americans, being a Zionist meant support of Israel as a Jewish state that was democratic in politics and supported the civil rights of non-Jews living there (in a far from perfect way, Palestinian residents of Israel not being subject to the same laws as Jewish citizens until a parliamentary decision in 1966, for example, but the intent to respect minority rights was indeed held by most Israelis).

This understanding of Zionism is not consistent with anti-Zionist rhetoric I am hearing today in the US. I find the need to obfuscate odd, as 20^th-century Palestinian nationalism did not see a need to reject this definition. A seminal Palestinian work of the era, Edward Said’s Orientalism, recognized that Israel had made accomplishments on behalf of the Jewish people. For Said, the problem wasn’t what Jews had; it was what Palestinians didn’t have.

It’s hard to argue that 20^th-century Jews didn’t need a refuge from persecution. Most Jews living in Israel today immigrated from the Middle East or North Africa. Once thriving communities were liquidated in the face of persecution or fear of future persecution. Up through the 1990s, with the immigration of Ethiopian and Soviet Jews, Israel can be said to have been serving this protective role for Jews.

In today’s world, the majority of non-Israeli Jews live in the US, and most of those who don’t live in other places where Jews are unlikely to face pogroms (e.g., Canada, UK, France). The diminished need for Israel as a physical refuge for Jews living elsewhere in the world led to the term post-Zionist in 1990s Israeli intellectual circles. Although use of this term has largely disappeared, the idea that Zionism as saving Jews from persecution was more important in the 20^th century than the 21^st goes a long way toward understanding generational attitude shifts.

At present, a large majority of people living in Israel and occupied Palestine, both Jewish and Palestinian, hold no foreign passport. The ~8 million Jews and ~6 million Palestinians living in that region are staying under any future scenario, as they have nowhere else to go. A replacement of classical Zionism with an ideology of a land for the people who live there seems overdue.

Nonetheless, power disparities require consideration of other, more contemporary, meanings of the word Zionism. The concept of “Christian Zionism” rose in parallel with dispensationalist Christianity. For the dispensationalists, Jesus will not return for his second coming until all the Jews in the world are gathered back in Israel. At this point, good Christians will be raptured up to heaven, and the Jews who refuse to convert will fight the forces of Satan and lose. This form of Zionism, in which Jews are meant to be slaughtered, cannot be said to be pro-Jewish. However, self-proclaimed Christian Zionists supported massive increases in US military aid to Israel. From the first dispensationalist to become prominent in the US government (James Watt, Interior Secretary under Reagan) to the most prominent (George W. Bush), the branding of opposition to unconditional support for Israel as anti-Semitic helped create the current security situation.

Religious nutjobs and Jewish institutions would not have sufficed to drive bipartisan support for Israeli military aid without the militarists. First expressed as the Kissinger Doctrine, the US sought bases to be able to take over any oil-producing country in the Middle East whenever needed to support American capitalism. Israel has always been a core part of this strategy; for decades, it was the only country in the region willing to host an American naval base. (There is now a second in Bahrain.) In the 1970s phase of this strategy, the other pillars of American interventionism were the Shah’s Iran, Hailee Selassie’s Ethiopia, and Turkey. In the 1990s and new Millennium, the US established military bases surrounding Iran (in Afghanistan and Iraq) and lining the Persian Gulf (in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and other countries).

Trump’s “Abraham Accords” resulted in close military coordination between the UAE and Israel; however, it did not keep the Saudis from seeking reconciliation with Iran (and ties to China). The Americanization of what would otherwise be an Israeli war against Iran and Trump’s neo-imperialism, with oil taking the place with Trump of what gold was to 16^th-century European monarchs, represents only the latest round in the idea of US support for Israel as a military necessity. Today, FOX News and its ilk will conflate dispensationalist and neo-imperial ideas under the banner of Christian Zionism. Any opposition is branded as antisemitism.

As neither a fundamentalist Christian nor an imperialist, I find this perversion of the term Zionism to be repulsive, yet it’s impossible to deny that there are more Christian Zionists in the world today than any other type of Zionist.

Emboldened by US support, a more radical form of Zionism, more properly labeled Jewish supremacy, has emerged in parallel with Christian Zionism. While West Bank Palestinians are now hemmed in by the “security wall” and restricted through military checkpoints along all major roads, Jewish settlers have been allowed to rampage through and terrorize Palestinian villages, often with the tacit or overt support of Israeli military personnel. Members of the current Israeli government, most prominently Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have openly embraced ideas of ethnic cleansing and fascism (the former even using the phrase “fascist homophobe” to describe himself). Israel’s parliamentary system has given this radical faction outsized influence on policy under the current prime minister even as a large majority of Israelis reject this type of “Zionism.”

Most of Israeli Jews who call themselves Zionists have adopted nihilism. Although many will admit that some form of two-state solution is the only long-term rational solution for the problem of two indigenous peoples, each with nowhere else to go, who each claim the same piece of territory, they will state that they don’t see a political possibility for it within their lifetime. Since October 7, 2023, a date with significance as a transition point for Jewish Israelis comparable to September 11, 2001, for Americans, Israelis have gone along with Netanyahu’s vision of total military victory as the only option for long-term security.

Allow me to sketch what is now a centrist Israeli viewpoint if only to shoot it down later: Iran was ultimately going to build a nuclear weapon and attack Israel. Therefore, it was an existential necessity to obliterate Iran’s military capabilities. Doing such meant eliminating both Hamas and Hezbollah first, as Israel could not fight a three-front war. It also meant close military coordination with the US, as total victory would not be possible without American resources. And this meant manipulating Donald Trump by playing to his vanities. At a minimum, once Netanyahu is through with the current military effort, it will buy at least a decade of “normal life” before more military action is needed. Meanwhile, expansion of the Abraham Accords will lead to prosperity.

Israeli Jews are only now starting to realize that this doctrine of perpetual war has costs. For them. Costs for Palestinians are not recognized as much as Americans would think, as the hyper-capitalist and ethnonationalist Channel 14 (and lesser imitators) now dominate what the Israelis see as news. It is also now dawning on average Israelis that Saudi Arabia (the largest and richest of their neighbors) is unlikely to normalize relations with Israel anytime soon, and economic relations with other parts of the world (especially Europe) are deteriorating. Playing both sides of the Russia/Ukraine war did not work out as planned either. But Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran still exist, so perpetual war is the only alternative to annihilation.

As such, the current form of Zionism for the majority of both Israeli and American Jews is silence. Silence in the face of a war in Gaza where AI-driven indiscriminate attacks against civilians, including children, was passed off as self-defense, despite it making life profoundly more unsafe for all. Silence in the US Democratic Party politics where the politicians would prefer to speak about literally anything other than the Middle East, or where narrow criticism of Trump (i.e., his unpredictability and lack of long-term strategy make this not the type of war Democrats would have fought) replaces any discussion of broader issues that is bound to be hijacked for soundbites in the meme/bumper sticker war.

Or in my case, relative silence, as few of you have gotten to this point in my post, so I am shouting into a relative void. It’s so much easier to just click “like” on a meme than to wrestle with complex issues, isn’t it?

My plea: at least avoid the stupid in your arguments. The average melanin content in skin cells of Jews and Palestinians in the region is comparable. Thus, defining one group as “black” and one as “white” is ridiculous. Strict application of post-colonial ideology also requires opposition to the group that considers itself citizens of another country to which they would be welcomed back, like the Pied-noirs (French citizens who were kicked out of Algeria in the 1960s). Neither major demographic group in this region has anywhere else to go. On the other hand, referring to Israeli settlers on the West Bank as colonists is a fair use of the term. These are Israeli citizens, subject to Israeli civilian law, where the Palestinians are subject to military rule.

The recent Israeli wars were wars of choice. Moreover, the level of civilian casualties in Gaza considered acceptable was intentionally set much higher than in any previous Israeli war. As half of Gazans are children, it’s long past time to abandon insistence that Israeli military conduct has been “the most moral in the world.”

And stop misusing the term anti-Zionist. The vast majority of Americans expressing reservations about the US/Israeli war with Iran are not opposing the idea that all people (including Jewish Israelis) deserve to be free from persecution and have a collective national identity. They don’t want their tax dollars going for endless war. That’s very different.