What the F**k is a Zionist?

The mob has found a new plaything

I lost a long-time X (formerly known as Twitter) buddy recently. Stef, from New York, had taken a turn into posting conspiratorial memes about the power of THEM. THEY were generally unnamed, but (to anyone paying attention) it was obvious which THEY he was referring to. I ignored these posts for a while - Stef had generally appeared to be an interesting and open-minded person. A few years ago, I would have interjected sooner, but there has been so much blatant antisemitism on display over the past few years: it gets exhausting. And there is no winning these discussions, whose main purpose appears to be Jew-baiting.

Then recently, Stef began clarifying who he meant by THEY. He posted “Zionists got bro shook, for real”, and I responded sarcastically (which in my experience is the best way to deal with such conversations if one wants to escape with one’s sanity) “Of course, we’re super-powerful and we’re everywhere, didn’t you know?” He replied, in McCarthyite terms, “Are you an admitted Zionist?” and I answered “Define Zionist”. He would not.

If this exchange seems a bit puzzling, it's because the Z-word is ultra-slippery, and has numerous meanings and implications depending on who is using it, and the context.  Using this not-particularly-subtle sleight of hand, the antisemitic propaganda of the 1930s has been resurrected, almost intact. Today, “Zionist” is often used as a direct substitute for “Jew”, since it enables overt antisemitism to be expressed without breaching hate speech rules or social taboos. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I dislike ‘hate speech’ censorship - all it does is encourage bigots to create new words, or redefine existing ones. It allows dumb bigots to be discredited while empowering the slightly smarter ones that know how to navigate the rules. Free speech is more essential in hateful times than ever.

I have encountered many similar situations over the past few years: one of the first times was during a discussion on a friend's Facebook thread. The thread had nothing to do with Israel; so I was a bit taken aback to be repeatedly called a Zionist by a friend of my friend. I asked why he was using this term in such an odd context, and he evaded several times, until finally he wrote “Don't worry, Yahudi”  (Yahudi meaning “Jew” in Arabic). In other words, he was simply attacking my identity, rather than responding to anything I said. In the past decade, such things have become normal.

I have seen people refer to “Zionist noses” (how strange that an ideology could have its own nose!) A recent tweet about the vandalism of mosques in London identified the perpetrators as Zionists just from some grainy CCTV footage. Famously, Jeremy Corbyn was recorded mocking British Jews by suggesting that British-born “Zionists” had “no sense of English irony”. We know that, when “Zionist” is used in such contexts, it almost always just means “Jew”.

Not everybody that uses the term understands this. Many believe there is really such a thing as a Zionist, who is part of a secret, yet globally-powerful network that undermines nation states, directs governments, owns much of the media, and pulls the magic levers that control the global economy. It just so happens that (totally coincidentally of course) this concept of a Zionist is an exact copy of the way in which the Nazis portrayed Jews.

I do not know if Stef realises this - he may well believe that he does not hate Jews, only Zionists. His X feed indicates confusion on this subject, such as the post where he claims that “Zionists are still evil, but I often use the term when I’m actually referring to Talmudists. Zionism is a relatively new form of evil. The Talmud is ancient evil.” This is nothing but gibberish (gibberish of course, being an ancient Zionist word from the lost continent of Zionanta). The Talmud is the ancient text of Jewish law, and a talmudist means little besides a scholar of the Talmud - a religious Jew or a rabbi perhaps. The purpose of this kind of nonsensical discourse is twofold: to confuse the reader and to taunt Jews.

So when I had asked Stef to define Zionist, it was both a genuine question (one that I had little hope of being answered honestly) as well as a prod: go on, be honest; say what you really mean. In years of asking this same question, nobody has given me a coherent answer. I ask the question because one can tackle antisemitism when it is unveiled. But when it masquerades under 1000 disguises and relies upon 1000 myths, it is hard to counter. Instead, accusations of antisemitism become an opportunity for gaslighting, for pointing the finger back at Jews; look at them, always trying to play the victim.

But what actually is Zionism?

To call somebody a Zionist in 2023 doesn't necessarily mean much, if the word is being used in its original sense. Zionism was a movement among the far-flung Jewish diaspora in the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim of the movement was to build a Jewish state in the Levant, at the heart of the diaspora - a ‘safe space’, to use the terminology of the modern American Left. It was a new take on an old yearning - Jews have always remembered where we once came from.

For most Jews in the diaspora, this was an eccentric idea. Jewish communities had been established in Europe, north Africa and west/central Asia for centuries. Some of these communities, in the Middle East and north Africa, had been established almost 2,000 years ago, when Jews had migrated throughout the Roman Empire. Few individuals within these long-established Jewish communities had much interest in returning to Jerusalem. Their homes were in France and Morocco, Syria and India, and dozens of other places.

But in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, rising nationalism and identity politics around the world made life for minority cultures - including, but not limited to Jews - more difficult. Hostility to  Jewish communities, both in European and Muslim societies, increased. The Holocaust was not an isolated incident, just the latest in a line of genocides and massacres that Jews had been subject to. But it was the biggest, killing two-thirds of Ashkenazi Jews. In 1939, there were about nine million of us; in 1945, three million. Jewish refugees from Europe, Asia and Africa, fleeing tragedy, destitution and violence, flocked to British Mandatory Palestine.

The moment Israel was established in 1948, the Zionist movement effectively ended. The Zionists became Israelis. There were no more Zionists in the original sense, any more than there are still Chartists in Britain or Abolitionists in the United States. To be a Zionist after 1948 was simply to support the principle that Jews (in common with all other people on the planet) had the right to exist, free from massacres, pogroms and genocides. To call oneself a Zionist was an expression of solidarity with refugees.

But now, the term began to be used maliciously.

The great miracle of 1945

In 1945, with the defeat of the Nazis, all of the antisemitism in the world instantaneously evaporated. This was truly a miracle, given that antisemitism in the Christian world dated back to the birth of Christianity; and in the Muslim world to the birth of Islam. Now antisemitism was finally vanquished. But in its place appeared anti-Zionism.

The Soviet Union and its supporters in the West were instrumental in creating and spreading this new movement, and the ideas of anti-Zionism began to spread through the western Left: this was the mechanism by which leftwing western antisemites, who had been laying low for a couple of decades, could resume their mission of ridding the world of Jews: a mission they often saw as a prerequisite for the creation of their utopian socialist dream.

Today, leftwing anti-Zionism presents Jewish refugees as colonisers. In post-civil rights America, where leftists have become utterly race-obsessed, a coloniser is one of the worst things a person can be. The new identity politics that has swept American university campuses declared its most desired goal to be decolonisation. To activists, decolonisation - however fancily it is dressed up within social science literature - means attacking and killing Jewish and white “colonisers”. This is why so many people on the Left, in the hours after the 7 October pogrom by Hamas, celebrated the rape and murder as an act of decolonisation. Anti-Zionism literally means the destruction of the Zionist project, Israel; and with it, the Jews.

The fact that Hamas believes in a conservative, imperialist version of Islam, which seeks to spread Islam by colonisation, is ignored by the western Left, which pretends to be against that sort of thing. The fact that Arabs are in the Levant because of Arab colonialism is not seen as relevant to a movement that claims to be against colonialism. This is not really a movement against colonialism: it simply meshes together traditional antisemitism with modern-sounding progressive soundbites (just as the Nazis did).

 As Professor Alan Johnson wrote in a submission to the UK Parliament: “Antisemitic anti-Zionism bends the meaning of Israel and Zionism out of shape – demonises both – until they become receptacles for updated versions of the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism. In short, that which the demonological Jew once was in older forms of antisemitism, demonological Israel now is in contemporary antisemitic anti-Zionism: uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment.”

The anti-Zionist message is becoming louder: recently, even Saint Greta was caught on camera screaming for Zionism to be crushed. Just as during the Nazi era, environmentalists, always among the least progressive people in ‘progressive’ politics, are being drawn to the fascist fringes.

So to answer Stef’s question: am I an #admitted Zionist”? It’s hard to tell, because it is unclear what he means by the word. If it refers to the founders of the state of Israel, then no - I wasn’t born then. If it means I believe that Israel has the right to exist; then yes. If it just means Jew; then also yes. If it means I’m part of a globalist / lizard people / Illuminati plot to rule the world? Sadly not. Although I might as well admit I am, because the anti-Zionist bots don’t really care what is real, rational or true. They are motivated by nothing more than the oldest hate.