What is Zionism? In 600 words

Zionists usually define Zionism as something abstract. It’s a feeling of Jewish connection to Israel. Or its the idea that the Jewish people have a right to be safe in their homeland, or, sing it with me now, that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish State!

Or, perhaps my favorite, as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs just put it, “Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, affirming their right to self-determination in their historic indigenous homeland, the Land of Israel.” It’s SEO and LLM optimized!

The problem with these definitions of Zionism is that Zionism was not an abstract idea but a “in real life” movement. It was a movement with leaders, institutions, policies and militias that set out to build what it called a Jewish state with a Jewish supermajority working at Jewish-only cooperatives living in Jewish-only colonies owned by Jewish-only land authorities operating Jewish-only schools maintained by Jewish-only militias in a country that was overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab. What could possibly go wrong?

The first thing that could and did go wrong was that not enough Jews moved to Palestine to outnumber the Palestinian Arabs. It was known as the “Arab problem,” i.e., the problem that there were too many Arabs in Palestine. By the mid-late 1930s, the Zionist movement settled on “transfer,” i.e., expulsion, as the optimal solution to this problem. And then, in 1948, that’s exactly what Israel did, expel about 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Then they expelled another 30,000 over the next decade. And then another 300,000 in 1967, along with 130,000 Syrians, and then they pushed out a few hundred thousand more from 1968 to 1993, and a few hundred thousand more since.

Today, Israel’s forcible displacement policies are on steroids. Israel is crowding Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel, and pushing them out of Palestine altogether at an accelerating pace. Now, it’s expanding into Lebanon and Syria and doing the same there to Lebanese and Syrians.

Zionists insist on a definition of Zionism detached from the history of the Zionist movement. As we said, the Zionist movement at its core was about the immigration of Jews into Palestine and the displacement of Palestinians out of it, the construction of Jewish settlements in it and the destruction of Palestinian ones, and the armament of Jewish militias and disarmament of Palestinian ones. That was how an Arab country was transformed into a Jewish one, demographically, physically and kinetically.

Zionists can call immigration “indigenousness,” they can call colonization “the right to self-determination” and they can call a policy of forever, forcible displacement “liberation.” They can do that.

But the propaganda isn’t working anymore. That’s why Israel’s Foreign Ministry budget will receive a $150 million bonus this year, more than a 20X increase in bonus blood money. That’s also why the Israel lobby in the US is responsible for the most expensive primaries in US American history. And that’s why Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post, since people aren’t buying the bullshit anymore.

And the reason is pretty simple. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza has ripped the mask off the underlying logic of Zionism. As Patrick Wolfe famously put it in his classic essay on the topic, settler-colonial movements, “without exception,” lead to a logic of the “elimination of the native.” And in the case of Palestine, the logic of the elimination of the native needed no theorizing by academics, not even a look at history. Instead, it has been on live-stream every day for the past 969 days, and counting.