Zionism is Antisemitism
Zionism has been, since its inception through today, an antisemitic ideology. Expelling it from the Jewish community is long overdue.
Zionism is on its death kneel in the Jewish Diaspora. No one can stop this train. Israel holds less and less legitimacy as Jews outside the Zionist state withdraw their support. This is a just fate for the apartheid settler-colonial state that is driving towards genocide every day, but it also makes a great deal of sense from a Jewish perspective. Zionism was founded on antisemitism, and infiltrated and forced its way onto the Jewish diaspora through the violent campaigns of Kahanites and Hasbara political machinery.
The idea of a mass rejection of Zionism from diasporic Jews has been considered somewhat of a pipe-dream, however when examining the history, Zionism and Judaism have always been in an unhappy marriage. Why do we so readily accept an outside, non-religious ideology that is barely a century old as the ultimate destiny for a people who trace their traditions back over 4 millennia? Why do we accept that nationhood is the fact and reality for a people who have been stateless, nationless and rootless across most of those 4 millenia?
Many of the people around this ideology’s founder, Theodor Herzl, rejected his Zionism, in particular his family and most of his descendants. His political theory was an absorption of antisemitic dogmas, and isn't religiously informed. It is rather inarticulate and unsophisticated. His ideology was founded on the idea that antisemitism was a fact of Judaism. He held most Jews in great contempt, and saw political unity with antisemites as something on the horizon for Zionism. It would appear that the early Zionists were unabashed “self-hating Jews”, an epithet they would later adopt for their enemies.
The truth is that most Jews did not accept Zionism at first. Many Chasidim never have, many more than the very visible Neturei Karta, who are unique amongst the anti-Zionist Orthodoxy for being politically active and having justice motivations, compared to the much larger Chasidic Satmar dynasty for example, who have no such motivations and simply consider Zionism and Israel to have no justification in the scripture. Much of the Reform movement, itself pre-Zionist, did not initially support Zionism, as the idea was to allow for a more secular Judaism and assimilation, and classical Reform Judaism did not view Jews as a nation (as did not the conservatives). The congregation that I grew up in did not allow Zionists until the 1970’s, and the shift towards more and more Zionism was something I witnessed in my youth.
David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, made it quite clear he valued the nation of Israel over that of diasporic Jews, no matter what the cost: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative.” Jewish immigration to Israel, also known as “aliyah”, has become the idea that all Jews must live in Israel. The Israel state apparatus knows that the diaspora does not want this, and so it deploys Hasbara troops to suffocate Judaism in the US and abroad, especially as Jewish immigration rates continue to fall. Since the decade that followed the post-Soviet break up Aliyah, where hundreds of thousands of Jews moved to Israel in the early 1990s, the majority of immigration to Israel has not been Jewish and shows no sign of returning to these rates. It seems the well has run dry, and the Israel state has certainly noticed.
When asked repeatedly during his first term as Prime Minister what was the most serious issue facing Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu answered very clearly over and over again, “Aliyah, Aliyah, Aliyah”. Not “national security”, “economic development”, no, it is Aliyah. Israel needs Jewish immigration in order to achieve its other goals, in particular having a counterpart of ethnic replacement to make displacement more permanent. Zionism’s primary currents, quite literally and explicitly sometimes, intend on the end of the Jewish diaspora as we know it, to annihilate the Jewish people as a category distinct from Israel. It is no secret that most Israeli Jews loathe the diaspora.
Zionism has been successful only where the Nazis have been in their ability to wipe a section of the Jewish diaspora off the map, as the Nazis did with Latvian Jews, and that was the Zionist annihilation of the Palestinian Jewry through replacement and forced assimilation. These Jews knew nothing of the European-borne antisemitism until Zionists brought it to them, and yet these Jews were forced to forget their beautiful Judeo-Arabic languages for that of Hebrew, the holy tongue which has become vulgarized by Zionism, alongside the Ladino speaking pilgrims of the Old Yishuv (pre-Zionist Jewish pilgrims). Many who were consciously propertyless and urbanized were rebounded to the land as Jews were needed in Israel for the purpose of conquest. Today, a few continue to live peacefully as they always did in occupied Palestine in the holy cities of Hebron and Jerusalem, but most were assimilated into the Sephardic Jewry and ethnically cleansed, with their historic memory mostly forgotten.
Look anywhere and you will find the Zionist mantra, that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. It is being repeated over and over again because the Jewish Zionists and philosemitic Goyim are in the first stage of grief, which is shock and denial. It is an expected reaction when faced with the fact you have been lied to. Liberal Zionism today is more advanced in its grief, willing accept almost any concession, even positioning themselves as “against the occupation” and singing much in tune with the demands of BDS movement. However, they cannot part with the other favorite Zionist mantra, “Israel has a right to exist”. The fact is, and what we need to all accept, is that it does not.
What right does Israel have to exist, as an enclave hostile to an entire region, as the producer of the world’s longest running refugee crisis, as an apartheid state? As the creator of useful idiots of the US Jewry? As dependent on US Imperialism? As the only nuclear power in the region? I believe the world has spoken. We don’t need Israel. We do not need two states or any partition, to break with Zionism means to break with the two-state solution, still cherished by liberal Zionists and even reprehensible socialist sects in the US. Every inch of land, from the river to the sea, is illegitimately claimed by the state of Israel.
Israel cannot exist in a world without Zionism, this fact might seem obvious but it is considerable the threat that Israel sees waning support as, but it may be fulfilled another way. Today, support from American Christian philosemites (and to a lesser but significant extent, German Leftist philosemites) for Israel is eclipsing that of American Jews, begging the question if withdrawing support is “too little, too late”, as the Israeli death machine can likely keep chugging along without American Jewish support.
We need an anti-Hasbara reckoning throughout the Jewish diaspora. They will need to helped along the stages of grief. The Kahanites who operate the boards of these organizations and who design birthrights trips to Israel will go kicking and screaming, but someone will have to make them kick and scream. We must remove flags of Israel from our bimuhs and remove Zionism from our services, and we should be total in this conquest of political power, leaving no stone unturned and resorting to any means necessary. We need to take over temple boards, Brotherhood and Sisterhood groups, student groups like Hillel, and all other institutions of Jewish life, until there are no longer any associations with Zionism. The brothers who command me to kill my cousins are my enemy.
Jewish statelessness and Jewish nationlessness is essential to Judaism. We are rootless cosmopolitans. We have no dual loyalties because we are loyal to no nation, only the oppressed across the planet. Judaism is diasporic or it is nothing. Zionism takes all of this away from us, and replaces it with the plastic culture of Israel, paid in blood of the Palestinian people in our name. Zionism wants to devour Judaism and spit it out. Zionism has always been, and will always be, antisemitic.
Further reading:
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine by Noel Ignatiev
https://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/17/zionism-anti-semitism-and-the-people-of-palestine/