Please stop talking about ‘zionism’

Seeing the word “zionism” is now a yellow flag for me, with “zionists” a bright red flag.

I hate having this reaction.

After the decades of homework I have done as an American Jew climbing out of pro-Israel propaganda — after a history rich in injustices committed under the flag of Israel — in this moment when the worst Israel hardliners are driving a genocide — I resent developing a reflexive cringe which makes me resemble apologists who dismiss every criticism of Israel as “antisemitism”.

I have no investment in Zionism. Though I place myself as “post-Zionist” rather than “anti-Zionist”, I count some schools of anti-Zionism as allies, and disagree respectfully with others.

But those are not the criticisms of ‘zionism’ filling my feed daily. They describe a moustache-twirling-evil ideology — which defines & directs the state of Israel, which is enthusastic about every wrong, which is thirsty for genocide, which fills all ‘zionists’ with hot malice toward Arab Palestinians. This imaginary ‘zionism’ is false, facile, and dangerous.

The word “Zionism” just does not mean that. Many early Zionists opposed the homeland they sought taking the form of a Westphalian nation-state like Israel; after the founding of the state in 1948, the core of Zionism becomes nothing other than support for Israel continuing to exist in some form. The history of the Zionist movement is riddled with bad ideas and brutality, but those do not define a multifaceted movement which also includes strains directly opposed to the violences committed by early Zionists, by Israel historically, and by Israel’s Likudnik leadership now.

There is plenty in Zionism to criticize — don’t get me started! — but one cannot dismiss support for the existence of Israel as so transparently evil that it is illegitimate … especially for Israelis who have never had another home.

Nor can one point to the specific injustices found in the bloody history of Israel as proof of Zionism’s aims or inevitable consequences. Zionism is not now, and never has been, A Plan To Do All This. Wariness of apologists who shrug over Israel-Palestine as Too Complex For Mortals To Judge should not drive us to overreact by dismissing the genuine complexity of the overlapping, historically-contingent actors and forces which brought us here.

The terms “Kahanism” and “Revisionist Zionism” are right there if you need a name for genocidal, anti-democratic Jewish nationalism. Since one needs to understand the history of Zionism to know those terms, it is frustrating but unsurprising that one rarely hears them.

Whether one misrepresents ‘zionism’ …

• … out of ignorance of what actual Zionists say & do
  or
• … out of arrogance claiming a right to decide what the word means

Whether one faults ‘zionism’ …

• … for making Israel an exceptionally evil nation
  or
• … chooses to single out and emphasize it as exemplifying an evil inherent in all nations

Whether one curses ‘zionists’ …

• … unaware how how this parallels actual Nazis using ‘zionists’ as a euphemism for “Jews”
  or
• … unconcerned about the parallel

… all of those moves are ugly.

I know many of the people offering faux ‘zionism’ well enough to see that they share my lefty commitments to justice, to see that antisemitic bigotry does not animate what they say, to see that they are hungry for explanations of the real evils of Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza. But bigots did originally author this story of ‘zionism’, and antisemitism is the payload. Getting played by this kind of propaganda is among many ways the left has not been thoughtful enough about the moves we make in response to the Gaza crisis.

It is unfair that having to step even more carefully than usual to avoid disinformation from crafty bad actors on all sides compounds the other burdens on advocacy for Palestinian liberation. Wrestling over the meaning of “Zionism” and over the roots of the horrors in Israel-Palestine distracts from talking directly about stopping Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.

But here we are. Talk of nonsense ‘zionism’ riddled with antisemitism has already eroded my trust in too many people.

This need not deter us from doing what we must. The most important things are simple. Israel’s current attack on Gaza is unjustified and brutal and must stop. The longstanding oppression of Arab Palestinians under the power of the state of Israel is unjust and must stop. Please stand there so that I can stand with you.

The function of misrepresentation

An instructive Twitter thread from weary mourner <@silentpenitent> about the dynamics of ‘anti-zionists’ grounding their arguments not in the prodigious real wrongs the state of Israel commits against Arab Palestinians, but instead wildly exaggerated misrepresentations:

So here’s the thing. Antisemitism from certain pseudo-left wing antizionists is not a bug, it’s not even just a feature, it’s a rhetorical strategy employed as part of a collective motte-and-bailey technique to make Jews look crazy to the large audience who largely don’t care.

Let’s illustrate this with a simple example: the Em Cohen <@EmCohen_> thread that nearly made me go berserk yesterday.

How am I just learning that October 7, 2023 is not the first concentration camp uprising that took place on October 7^th?

On October 7, 1944, the biggest and most spectacular mutiny and escape attempt in the history of Auschwitz occurred. Jews in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz II-Birkenau organized it. They set on elf the crematoria on fire, causing serious damage, and attacked the SS men in the vicinity. Some of the prisoners managed to cut through the fence and reach the outside, but unfortunately the SS managed to pursue and surround them, murdering them all. A total of about 250 Jews died fighting, including mutiny leaders Załmen Gradowski and Józef Deresiński. The SS lost three men killed and more than ten wounded. Later, four Jewish women who had stole explosive material from the Union-Werke armaments factory and supplied it to the Sonderkommando conspirators were hanged in public.

In 1944, the resistance cut the fences.

In 2023, the resistance bulldozed them.

the spirit of anti-fascist resistance will never die.

In the months leading up to up to October, these women had painstaking smuggled gunpowder from the factor to the secret resistance movement within the Sonderkommando. They used ingenious techniques, like hiding the tiny packages of powder in false bottoms of food trays, and even in the nooks of corpses being sent to the crematoria. All the while enduring the nerve-jangling possibility of being found out.

The gunpowder was used by the Sonderkommando to create makeshift bombs and grenades. This careful preparation came to a head on 7 October when — during a roll call — one of the prisoners calmly walked up to a Nazi officer and with a triumphant “Hurrah!” struck him with a hammer.

It is in no way a dismissal of the slaughter in Gaza to observe that any equivalency between (especially pre-current war) Gaza & Auschwitz is not only ignorant but obscene.

Pre-current war Gaza was besieged & blockaded by the Israeli & Egyptian states. However, it was in no respect a death or concentration camp. International aid, entire organizations solely devoted to Palestinian well-being & smuggling networks brought in food & necessary supplies.

It is not a defense of Israel or Zionism to observe that the Auschwitz concentration-death camp complex had a death toll of minimum 1.1 million (of min. 1.3 million inmates) in 5 years and pre-war Gaza has defiantly endured & even prospered for over 50 years.

It’s simple fact.

Gaza doesn’t need to be in even the same ballpark as Auschwitz for the siege of Gaza to be a source of tremendous unnecessary suffering or the present war to be a humanitarian disaster. Things can be awful without being the most awful ever! So why the comparison from Em?

One reason, of course, can be dismissed as simple narcissism. The current war needs to be the worst thing ever — or in continuity with it — so Em and their friends can congratulate themselves on their glorious stance in the One True Horror.

But I think there’s more to it.

After all, let’s be real here. Em’s Jewish. Like many of the other worst pick-mes currently trying to get the left to re-embrace “ZOG,” Em knows the buttons to press to hurt Jews, because they’re their buttons.

Em makes the comparison to piss Jews off, because angry people go berserk.

It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to recognize that most bystanders, being essentially uncommitted & emotional, tend to side with the person who’s wailing about the suffering in Gaza being just like the Nazis over the angry Jew who actually knows what “like the Nazis” means.

After all, if you’re the one saying the objective fact of “this is awful but it’s not nearly as bad as the Holocaust,” you look like the asshole (especially to a mostly Gentile, younger audience sick of being told to care about the Shoah & even seeing Jews as whiners for it).

Em’s thread is bait. It’s there to infuriate Jews into overextending with righteous rage so that less insane or openly offensive antizionists can go “see? look at the brutes! look at how little they have learned from the Holocaust! Look at how they lack compassion!”

The entire thing from Em & those like them — to be clear this is not a blanket judgment of antizionism — is, fundamentally, antisemitic, because what else could one call targeted rhetorical attacks on a marginalized community’s cultural traumas but exploiting bigotry? And that is a shitty, wretched strategy ultimately designed not to persuade but to ostracize, to exploit the fact that there simply are not that many Jews so that Gentiles sick of “Whiny Jews” can just crush the (Zionist, majority) Jews in question wholesale. Because of course the Jews faced with such Holocaust inversion rhetoric get pissed, that’s what people do faced with bigotry.

But those using these tropes know most people know very little about Gaza or Auschwitz & care less, but want to be seen as the Reasonable Righteous One.

The siege and blockade of Gaza does not need to be even in the same universe as Auschwitz to be a profound injustice & humanitarian crisis. The need to declare it thus can thus only be explained as self-aggrandizement, rhetorical manipulation, or both. Because as the person saying “this humanitarian crisis is, objectively, not Like The Holocaust,” you look like the asshole (not least because Gentiles long for the Shoah to be “dethroned”). Then some “reasonable” antizionist can sweep in in Em’s wake & look humanitarian & righteous.

Antizionism isn’t necessarily based on bigotry. But this rhetorical rope-a-dope sure is!

(Especially since, uh, the Sonderkommandos revolting on October 7 1944 did not then promptly sweep through German civilian areas butchering random civilians, Em! But then, you’d probably want to ignore the part where Hamas’ glorious fence-cutting was to zero military purpose.)