Breaking down contemporary Zionism and the deliberate conflation with antisemitism. We deconstruct both anti-Zionism and Zionism to help make it clear where we see the difference.
A diagnostic quiz. Designed for an audience that may have been taught "Zionism = Jewish safety".
You likely believe Jewish safety is best protected through state power.
You may have internal conflicts between Jewish ethics and state violence.
You likely believe that no state is above equality.
Many people are taught that Zionism equals the belief that Jewish people deserve safety and self-determination. That framing is dangerous because it collapses three very different things into one:
A global people with many cultures, beliefs, and politics.
A universal moral claim and necessity.
A modern political ideology demanding a Jewish-supremacist nation-state in historic Palestine.
Anti-Zionism rejects #3. Not #1 or #2.
That distinction is everything.
It is not just a feeling or identity. It has concrete features:
Self-determination is about people, not states. States do not have inherent moral rights. People do.
Zionism treats the state as sacred even when it enforces segregation. If a state can only exist by denying equality, then the problem is the state not the demand for equality.
Democracy requires equal citizenship regardless of ethnicity. Zionism explicitly rejects this by prioritizing Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in law and land access.
That is not democracy. That is managed supremacy.
If you believe in religious freedom, separation of church and state, and equal protection, Zionism directly contradicts those values.
This is not security. This is empire asking for loyalty.
"Jewish safety requires Jewish dominance."
Requires walls, bombs, and permanent war.
"Jewish safety requires equality, not supremacy."
Demands shared humanity and political courage.
A map of how power justifies itself. Comparing structures, not people.
Hierarchy & Justified Violence
Requires permanent internal enemies & militarized borders.
Shared Rhetoric
Same Words.
Opposite Meanings.
Equality & Universalism
Safety comes from justice, not domination.
A Jewish Debate, From the Beginning
One of the most persistent myths surrounding Zionism is that it represents a natural, ancient, or universal Jewish aspiration. It does not.
Core Clarification
Judaism is a religion, an ethical tradition, and a peoplehood. Zionism is a modern political ideology, emerging in late 19th-century Europe. They are not the same—and they have often been in conflict.
Jewish life is organized around law, community, ethics, and diaspora. Political sovereignty is largely rejected as premature and dangerous. Return to the land is understood as messianic, not political.
Jews face pogroms and exclusion. Competing Jewish responses emerge: Socialism, Bundism, Assimilation, and Religious traditionalism. Zionism is a minority view. Many Jews see nationalism itself as the danger.
Theodor Herzl convenes the First Zionist Congress. Immediate Jewish opposition emerges, arguing Zionism mirrors European racial nationalism and endangers Jews by tying them to colonial power.
Orthodox leaders reject Zionism as heretical. Jewish socialists reject it as reactionary. The Jewish Labor Bund insists: "Where we live, there is our homeland."
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are expelled. Zionism becomes a state ideology. Jewish dissent is marginalized. Anti-Zionist Jews face a new accusation: opposing the state equals betraying the people.
Israel occupies Gaza and the West Bank. Military rule becomes permanent. A new Jewish critique emerges: Occupation is incompatible with Jewish ethics.
Mass civilian killing in Gaza. Genocide is named by scholars and survivors. Zionism becomes globally synonymous with permanent war and legalized inequality. Jewish anti-Zionists are no longer fringe.
Zionism did not become controversial because people forgot Jewish history. It became controversial because people started remembering it.
Inspired by Caitlin Johnstone. Click here to read.
“Zionism means exactly what we see before us today.”
Ideologies are not poetry. They are systems of power. Power reveals itself through enforcement, borders, and violence.
Many cling to the idea that it started as refuge and went wrong later. But an ethno-religious state in a land already inhabited could only be built and maintained through force.