It is said that Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first president of the State of Israel, was once asked by a member of the House of Lords why Jews were so fixated on one tiny, contested piece of land. Were there not other territories in which a Jewish state could be established? Weizmann responded that this would be like asking why he had driven 20 miles to visit his mother, when there were many other perfectly nice old ladies living on his street.
Weizmann’s analogy still strikes a chord with Jews today because it conveys a truth which has, in recent years, become angrily contested, most often by those who are not themselves Jewish. It is a truth too often distorted, politicised or denied – that the Jewish relationship with Israel is built upon a foundation of historical fact, theological axiom and innate love. It is central to Jewish identity and peoplehood. It is a relationship which existed long before the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel, long before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century, and long before Nathan Birnbaum coined the term “Zionism” in 1890.
The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Zionism is: “a movement (originally) for the re-establishment and (now) the development of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.” Yet, it has become fashionable to unthinkingly repeat the slur that Zionism is racism, colonialism or even fascism; that it is some kind of fringe or extreme expression of Judaism, a destructive political strain of the Jewish faith, or sometimes even totally distinct from it; that the only decent, peace-loving Jews must therefore be those who define themselves as anti-Zionists.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While not all Jews today identify positively with the State of Israel nor consider themselves to be Zionist, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a London-based research organisation, 73 per cent of British Jews say they feel an emotional attachment to Israel. According to the Pew Research Centre, 80 per cent of American Jews say that caring about Israel is an important part of their Judaism. For most, Zionism is an integral part of Jewish identity. Yet we are now seeing the term routinely deployed as a term of abuse, not only on social media, but also in professional and social contexts. Students at Birmingham University thought nothing of demanding “Zionists off our campus” – effectively a call for the expulsion of the majority of Jews. A recent employment tribunal even found that an academic, dismissed by Bristol University for claiming that Jewish students were agents of a foreign power and seeking to subvert democracy, had been unfairly dismissed because his anti-Zionism qualified as a philosophical belief and was therefore a “protected characteristic”. The tribunal opted to protect a belief which exists to oppose a fundamental aspect of Jewish identity.
Several months ago, an English comedian posted a death threat on social media against a female Jewish performer. He was eventually persuaded to delete the post and apologise, but when doing so, he reassured his followers, as though in mitigation for his actions, that he had “made a point to say ‘Zionist’ and not ‘Jewish’”.
I could share many more examples of how warped the use of the word Zionist has become, but suffice it to say that to search the term on social media today is to lower oneself into a sickening cesspool of hatred, demonisation and falsehood.
Since the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the resulting tragic conflict that sadly still rages on multiple fronts, this problem has grown far worse and is more damaging than ever to Jewish communities across the globe. That is why, as we mark the first anniversary of the attacks, there is an urgent need to set out as clearly as possible how we who proudly profess our Zionism define it and why, in fact, it is inseparable from our Judaism.
To understand what Zionism is, one first needs to understand what Judaism is.
Jews are a people with a common ancestry, heritage and faith. We are a people with a shared destiny and a shared set of values rooted in the Bible. Today, Jews are extremely diverse politically, religiously and culturally, but remarkably are united by few things more than the centrality of Israel.
For religious Jews, the Biblical Covenant established between God and the Jewish People is the central tenet of our faith. A critical component of this is the promise made to the Jewish People of a homeland, the journey to it and the experience of living within it. The Torah (Five Books of Moses) is, in effect, a 3,000-year-old constitutional document for the establishment of a nation state in the territory known previously as Canaan and later as the Kingdom of Judah or Judea. Jews know it simply as the Land of Israel.
This constitution establishes institutions and infrastructure for national life. It contains both civil and criminal codes of law.
Early Jewish spiritual life was centred entirely around the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, to this day, over half of all Jewish religious obligations only apply in the Land of Israel, from rules related to pilgrimage to large swathes of obligations governing farming and agriculture. It would have been almost impossible to conceive of Jewish life anywhere else until the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonian empire in 586 BCE. This led to the dispersal of its inhabitants and arguably to the subsequent conflicts and conquests which have plagued that same tiny piece of land ever since. Cyrus the Great of Persia permitted Jews to return from exile and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, but following their bloody conquest of Judea some 500 years later, the Roman empire would eventually exile the majority of Jews.
Judaism – literally the ways of the people of the Kingdom of Judah – was the term given to the new “portable” version of their identity. It was this adaptation from a national identity to an “ism” which could be practised anywhere in the world, which helped to ensure that Jewish life continued to live on. The colonising Romans changed the name of Judea to Syria-Palaestina, in an effort to expunge all connection of the Jewish People to it. Thus began a campaign of delegitimisation and erasure which survives to this day.
For nearly 2,000 years, the Jewish People, scattered amongst the nations of the world, continued to live according to the values and principles prescribed by their constitution, the Torah, but without their ancestral homeland. They embraced numerous societies. “Through you all the nations of the world will be blessed,” God promised Abraham. And so, Jews laid down roots and committed themselves to contribute to the success of their newly found homes.
However, the Land of Israel, and Jerusalem in particular, always remained at the heart of their everyday worship. The eventual return to their homeland was central to their Jewish psyche. In multiple prayers every day for thousands of years, we have faced towards Jerusalem, known as “Zion”, which appears no less than 152 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is the very heart of our Jewish faith and identity. No wonder, notwithstanding the constant exiles and persecution, there has always been a Jewish presence in Israel, mainly located close to holy sites, in cities like Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed.
Until the turn of the 19th century, most Jews simply did not have the means nor the opportunity to even consider a return to the land of their prayers and their forebears. Yet, as the threat of pogroms increased in Russia and eastern Europe and the persecution of Jews intensified in Arab lands, more and more Jews attempted to return if they could. Tens of thousands, mainly from eastern Europe, came towards the end of the 19th century, and several hundreds of thousands followed by the early 1940s.
Most were primarily motivated by a fierce longing to break free from the cycle of exile and oppression and were inspired by the global trend towards national liberation and self-determination. At this stage, secular Jews in particular longed for a life lived not at the whim of hostile rulers, but as masters of their own destiny in their ancestral homeland.
Unbridled anti-Jewish hatred provided the push and 2,000 years of yearning for a return to Zion, the home of the Jewish People and Judaism, provided the pull. This was the crucible in which the movement we now refer to as Zionism was forged, built on a foundation of our axiomatic, millennia-old religious and historical connection to the Land of Israel.
Following the Second World War, the merciless murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust made clear what many Jews had been arguing for so long: it was essential to establish a Jewish state which would never close its borders to Jews when they had nowhere else to turn. The case for Jewish self-determination had become a matter of survival.
When all the politics and wilful misinformation are stripped away, Zionism is nothing more or less than the near 4,000-year-old expression of the Jewish People’s connection to, and right to self-determination in, the land situated at the very heart of Jewish faith and peoplehood.
Zionism has also been responsible for a renaissance of Jewish cultural life. It has revived the Hebrew language, theatre, literature, music, art and academia. It has provided a focal point for Jewish national expression in a way which is simply not possible in the diaspora.
For most Jews, therefore, whether religious or secular, Zionism is both an existential imperative and a fundamental aspect of their Jewish identity.
This also explains why a synagogue, a school or any other organisation can be proudly Zionist without that fact having any political connotations. Zionism is not jingoism or imperialism. In and of itself, it contains no hint of expansionism or bigotry. It is quite simply a manifestation of the unbroken attachment of the Jewish People to and presence in the Land of Israel.
It is essential to understand that Zionism does not entail an endorsement of the policies of a particular Israeli government, nor is it mutually exclusive with advocating for the welfare or rights of Palestinians. On the contrary, anyone familiar with the writings of Theodor Herzl, the father of contemporary Zionism, will know that his vision was of a Jewish state that could and would live together in harmony and prosperity with its Arab neighbours. Indeed, Israel’s Declaration of Independence makes this explicit with its commitment to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, conscience, language, education and culture,” whilst also “extending a hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples, in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness…”
Sadly, Israel’s history has been plagued by war and violence, as hostile surrounding countries sought to deny Jews the right to live peacefully in their national homeland within a vibrant democracy.
That conflict has frequently been painful, often unbearably so, and the challenge of reconciling the destinies of two peoples in the same land has become ever more intractable with each passing decade. It is important to understand that Zionism is not an obstacle to that reconciliation – indeed, the chance to realise it was offered to both Jewish and Arab inhabitants of the land by the United Nations in 1947. Whereas the Jewish population grasped the opportunity to establish a state with both hands, the Palestinian Arab leadership and neighbouring Arab states firmly rejected it, preferring to wage war. Ever since that time, it has not been Zionism that has created conflict. Israel has endured and thrived despite the repeated attempts and the enduring desire to wipe it off the map.
The fallacy that Zionism and, more specifically, the existence of Israel, is fundamentally incompatible with the well-being of the Palestinian people has become increasingly pervasive over recent years, and its prevalence serves only to harm the cause of peace. We must have no truck with the narrative that Zionism is somehow inherently prejudiced. Zionism advocates self-determination for Jews. It does not agitate against the welfare and well-being of Palestinians. Consequently, I can, at one and the same time hold Zionism at the core of my Jewish identity whilst simultaneously feeling deep pain in seeing the suffering of numerous innocent Palestinians.
Zionism transcends the politics and policies of the day. Israel is a vibrant democracy within which there is healthy and often intense debate. Indeed, the most impassioned critics of any Israeli government are found within Israel itself, but their Zionism remains undimmed. This deep religious, historic, covenantal and emotional bond between the Jewish people and Israel does not mean that every Jewish person plays a role in nor is supportive of every decision taken by any given Israeli government. That is why the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism correctly identifies “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel” as being manifestly anti-Semitic. This is not the same as acknowledging or celebrating the unarguable collective Jewish relationship with Israel – a case often made by some to suit their flawed narrative that Israel and Judaism are totally separate from one another. Diaspora Jews may be deeply connected to Israel, but they cannot be held responsible for it.
Sadly, there is an increasing tendency to single out Israel, the Jewish state, and by extension, Jewish people, for special treatment in a manner that is inconsistent with how other countries or global conflicts are viewed. In 2023 alone, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Israel on a total of 14 occasions, while over the same period it condemned countries in the rest of the world put together just seven times . In such forums, the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence is challenged and undermined in a manner not found with respect to any other people or country. A hateful cocktail of singular scrutiny and demonisation is now being routinely used as a tool of delegitimisation. That tool has a name: anti-Zionism.
According to data from the UK’s Community Security Trust, a charity that protects British Jews, the first six months of 2024 saw the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever recorded in the UK. Our synagogues and schools have needed to be protected by more guards and higher walls. In May it was reported that police had thwarted a plot to attack a Jewish community in north-west England with automatic weapons. What happens in Israel has a direct impact on the everyday life of Jewish communities around the world. The simplistic thinking that underpins the knee-jerk reaction in holding all Jews to account for everything that takes place in Israel must be refuted at every turn.
It is extremely sad that the existence of a Jewish state in a land within which the Jewish people were indigenous long before the dawn of both Christianity and Islam should be seen as controversial in any way. Zionism, which upholds this right of the Jewish People to a national home in their ancestral homeland, is undoubtedly best served by a peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians.
I am a Zionist because I believe that alongside the world’s 157 Christian-majority countries and 49 Muslim-majority countries, there is a vital need for a single Jewish country. I am a Zionist because I am committed to the idea that even in a place where conflict has reigned for centuries, peace is achievable and worth fighting for. I am a Zionist because I have inherited a language, culture and faith from the indigenous people of Judea. I am a Zionist because over thousands of years, my ancestors recommitted daily to holding Israel at the heart of their faith. I am a Zionist because I am a Jew.
[See also: What it means to be Jewish now]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history