Israel/Palestine

The Word Zionism Is Dead: From the start, it’s meant too many things. It’s time to move on. (Nadine Epstein, Mar 18, 2026, Moment)

I am editor-in-chief of a magazine with a great Jewish legacy, and I have never once in my life used the terms Zionist or anti-Zionist to describe myself or anyone else. Why? When I use a word, I want to know where it’s been and how it’s going to be understood, and with anything Zionism-related, that’s a nearly impossible task.

And so I am going to propose something that may sound radical. It is beyond time to strike the words Zionist and Zionism from modern political discourse and relegate them to history, where they belong. They have outlived their usefulness both as concepts and as terms. This means we must immediately cease labeling ourselves and others as Zionists and anti-Zionists, and use the word Zionism only when referring to the historical political movement. […]

If we believe in the right of people to form nations, which at this point of human development most of us do, then Zionism has long been a moot point. Given Israel’s right to exist, I would go a step further and say that the label Zionism has become outright dangerous. The use of the term by its very nature keeps the question of existence unnecessarily alive. It’s like a scab that keeps forming and reforming and never heals. The Zionist family of terms has increasingly become polarizing for the American public, and even worse, it is unnecessarily splintering the American Jewish community, all at a time of rising antisemitism. Wherever I go, and I travel in many circles, I hear the words Zionist and anti-Zionist invoked and hurled with equal God-like certainty, terrifying self-righteousness and perilous imprecision.

The American Jewish community is as mystified by the meaning of Zionist and Zionism as the broader public. Look at the 2026 survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America: Only one-third of American Jews said they identified as Zionist. At the same time, nearly nine out of ten said they supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

A Zionism that does not intellectually make the case for Palestinian self-determination is not worth honoring.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

How Israel Lost Americans (Michelle Goldberg, 7/08/26, The New York Times)

It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel, but a Gallup poll that came out on Friday marks a turning point. For the first time in the poll’s 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The shift wasn’t just among Democrats, whose opinion of Israel has been in free fall in recent years. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of independents now sympathize with Israel; 41 percent sympathize with the Palestinians. Among adults under 35, support for Israel has fallen to a record low of 23 percent. With numbers like this, bipartisan backing for Israel, long a constant in American politics, will in time become unsustainable.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing of villages.

As Ariel Sharon understood, becoming the oppressor was always going to be fatal to Israel’s position in the West, nevermind the damage to the state itself and the soul of the people.

WHITE PRIVILEGE:

How to Sell a Genocide exposes the double standards of reporting on Gaza (Jeff Sparrow, May 28, 2026, The Conversation)

The International Association of Genocide Scholars describes the Israeli war on Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. The association’s position came after a vote, so we know it reflects the judgement of 86% of its members.

Almost all the major human rights organisations and NGOs agree, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Yet most liberal news outlets still do not use the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza.

Johnson shows how such lexical scruples do not apply elsewhere. “Even though the destruction of Gaza, by all objective metrics, has been magnitudes more brutal and deadly than that of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine,” he observes, “the totalising moral labels of ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ were used on CNN and MSNBC 17.2 times more often in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Israel’s action in Gaza.”

His review of the first 30 days of the two conflicts found that, on CNN and MSNBC, Ukrainians were described on air as victims of genocide or war crimes 1,790 times: 1,515 for war crimes and 275 for genocide. When the victims were Palestinian, the terms were used 104 times: 92 for war crimes and 12 for genocide.

“Ostensibly non-opinionated reporters and ‘analysts’ on both MSNBC and CNN,” writes Johnson, “often asserted, as a matter of fact, that Russia was committing war crimes against Ukrainians, without this being seen as violating their neutrality.”

The only existential threat to Israel is the way it has degraded its culture.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov review – the long view: An erudite account of the foundation of the state and its subsequent moral and political decline (Avi Shlaim, 9 May 2026, The Guardian)

The moral and political degradation of Israel is the subject of this remarkable book. The author, Omer Bartov, has impeccable credentials for writing it: he was born on a kibbutz, he served as an officer in the IDF, and is currently professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US. It is dedicated to his father, Hanoch Bartov, “the last Zionist”, a reference to the liberal brand of Zionism to which the whole family were evidently dedicated. Yet this book is written more in sorrow than in anger. Its goal is not to condemn Zionism but to explain its evolution from a dream to a nightmare.

To do so, Bartov goes back to the formation of Israel in 1948. In a chapter entitled The Missing Constitution, he bemoans the failure of the founding fathers to resolve the question of how a multi-ethnic state can remain both Jewish and democratic; in other words, their failure to square the circle of ethno-nationalism and pluralism.

Had a written constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence been adopted, he argues, and had generations of Israelis been raised with respect for the constitution and pride in a bill of rights for all human beings, “the creeping racism of Israeli society might have been tempered, and the astonishing indifference to the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and the daily crimes and pogroms on the West Bank might have elicited a greater sense of scandal”. Maybe. History does not disclose its alternatives. Arguably, however, Bartov does not go back far enough in history to explore the roots of Israeli racism. Zionism is a self-avowed settler-colonial movement and its principal political progeny – the state of Israel – is a settler-colonial state. The logic of settler-colonialism is the elimination of the natives in order to take over the land and its resources. Ethnic cleansing is the means by which this goal is achieved. In 1948, the newly born state of Israel carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine: 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”. From the point of view of the victims, the viciousness of Zionism is nothing new; they have known it all along.

Moreover, the Nakba was not a one-off event; it is an ongoing process.

DEPARTING THE ANGLOSPHERE:

What Went Wrong in Israel? A Genocide Scholar Examines ‘What Zionism Became’: In his new book, Omer Bartov tracks how a liberatory strand of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he sees as responsible for genocide in Gaza (Aaron Gell, 4/21/26, The Guardian)

Much of What Went Wrong? focuses on what Bartov frames as the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights. Had Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, pushed for either approach, Bartov argues, the nascent state might well have grown into the kind of liberal democracy it has, however speciously, long proclaimed itself to be.

Despite his condemnation of present-day Israeli society, Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy.

Bartov acknowledged that the idea seems far-fetched as corpses are still being dug from the rubble of Gaza and Israel is prosecuting yet another bloody war. But what he sees as the nation’s preference for military confrontation over diplomacy depends entirely on American support, he pointed out, and that patronage is now being tested as never before. As a result of the Gaza genocide, a clear majority of Democratic voters now have a negative view of Israel. More recently, the ill-conceived US-Israeli aggression against Iran has significantly eroded GOP support. “Maga is becoming anti-Israel,” Bartov said, due to “Netanyahu completely leading Trump by the nose into a completely idiotic war”.

Despite some alarming strains of ethnic bias underlying the perception of wealthy and powerful Jewish interests manipulating the US government, pointing out antisemitism has lost effectiveness, in part because the influence of pro-Israel donors on US politics – and Israel’s campaign to convince the US to wage war on Iran – is undeniable. Additionally, the charge of antisemitism has grown hollow, Bartov said, due to its flagrant “weaponization” as “a tool to shut people up” as the state wreaks destruction on its neighbors. “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism,” he writes in What Went Wrong?, “Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.”

As a result, America’s indulgence of its longstanding Middle East ally may at last be reaching its limits. Should the United States withhold military support – as is advocated by growing numbers of Democratic policymakers – “Israel will have to go through a process of coming to terms with itself,” Bartov predicted. Under such circumstances, the country would have no choice but to pursue diplomacy. Ironically, that might be the so-called Jewish state’s best hope for a peaceful and prosperous future.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

PALESTINE IS A NATION:

Americans’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted dramatically, new poll shows (LINLEY SANDERS, February 27, 2026, AP)

Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

The assassination that changed Israel forever (Yossi Melman, 2 November 2025, The Spectator)

After the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, right-wing circles – especially among Jewish settlers – launched a public campaign that grew increasingly aggressive. What began as verbal incitement soon escalated into physical violence and criminal acts.

Itamar Ben-Gvir – today Israel’s minister of national security – was then a young disciple of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who preached Jewish supremacy. Ben-Gvir infamously tore the Cadillac emblem off Rabin’s car and declared before television cameras: ‘We got to the symbol – and we’ll get to him too.’ At several demonstrations, protesters came dangerously close to physically attacking Rabin.

Riding that wave of incitement were senior opposition figures from the Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu was among the most prominent voices fanning the flames. He marched at the head of a demonstration where protesters carried a coffin bearing Rabin’s name.

At a major rally in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, weeks before the assassination, Likud leaders stood on a balcony – among them Netanyahu, who delivered a fiery speech; Ariel Sharon, and others. When posters depicting Rabin in an SS uniform began circulating in the crowd, some Likud leaders, including future prime minister Ehud Olmert, realised the rally was spiraling out of control and left the scene. Netanyahu stayed.

After the assassination, Ami Ayalon was appointed head of the Shin Bet, replacing the failed Carmi Gillon. Ayalon told me last week bluntly that the politicians on the balcony may not have intended Rabin’s death, but their presence – without condemning the sights and chants of the rally – granted legitimacy to extremists. ‘It’s always the minority that acts,’ he observed.

The justice system also failed to act. Although 340 cases of incitement and violence were opened, prosecutors and judges dragged their feet – even after Rabin himself appealed to Supreme Court President Aharon Barak to intervene. ‘Our approach,’ admitted then–Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, ‘was to show tolerance toward free speech and the right to protest. In retrospect, that was a mistake.’

Ironically, there was a brief time when they could have escaped their spiral out of the West, when Sharon was in power and realized Israel was best served by Palestinian statehood. His stroke was the real disaster.

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel: In the early years, American Jewish support for Israel was a fraught issue. The turning point was the six-­day war of 1967, which solidified a strength of feeling that has only recently begun to fracture (Mark Mazower, 25 Sep 2025, The Guardian)

Of the few figures who stood out against the tide, perhaps the most notable was William Zukerman, a journalist who had been reporting on international Jewish affairs since the 1920s. Arguing that since 1948 the terms ­anti-­Zionist and Zionist had lost their meanings, Zukerman described himself as “pro-Israel” but “anti-nationalist”. He criticised what he called “the wave of Messianic nationalism which the Hitler Holocaust has released” among American Jews. In embracing the ethnic chauvinism that had swept over the world since the late 1930s, he argued that the Jews risked adopting a cruelty that was already changing “the entire character of the people”. Israel had turned Jews into “conquerors” whose indifference to the plight of the Arab refugees betrayed Judaism’s tradition of sympathy for the oppressed. For Zukerman, the Israeli leadership’s deliberate efforts to identify the country with Jews abroad served merely to increase the danger of antisemitism faced by the latter since it introduced “new diplomatic and political reasons in addition to the old social, economic and psychological ones”.

Zukerman’s articles were much discussed by American Jews at the time and are attracting new interest today. Nor was he alone: other Jewish leaders expressed similar concerns. But such a stance carried costs, and he was denounced as a “self-hating Jew” and an antisemite. What he termed a “perverted chauvinistic reasoning” meant that his opinions were treated “as almost the equivalent of treason”. He wrote: “To criticise any policy of Israel, whether it is the rendering homeless of a million native Arabs, the treatment of the Arab minority as­ second-class citizens or the transformation of the new state into a racial theocracy, is denounced not only as anti-­Israel but as ­antisemitic.”

One senses the shock he felt at the term being applied in this way to someone like him, who had done as much as anyone to chart the rise of antisemitism in interwar Europe. We are here at the very beginning of what one might call a kind of Zionist usage of the term that was only conceivable once Israel itself had come into existence. Recent research has revealed that Israeli diplomats were concerned enough about Zukerman’s influence to mount a ­behind-­the-scenes campaign against him, enlisting American Zionist organisations and eventually pressuring the proprietors of Jewish newspapers to drop him. As a result, his articles ceased to be widely available and when he died in 1961 his Jewish ­Newsletter, which he had kept going for 14 years, folded.

IS JUDAISM A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

Poised to Strike: Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza—but will it be stymied by criticism from abroad and discontent at home? (Benny Morris, 24 May 2025 , Quillette)

This week, the Israel Air Force (IAF) continued to hunt, bomb, and rocket the Hamas terrorist squads hiding among Gaza’s civilians, killing more women and children in the process—so far, according to Hamas figures, some 30,000 Palestinian women and children have died since October 2023. Meanwhile, Israel’s international position dramatically worsened. EU member states and Canada have imposed minor sanctions against the Jewish state and threaten worse. Observers in Jerusalem have warned that Israel faces an international relations “tsunami.” In Washington, Israel’s staunchest ally, President Donald Trump’s aides, speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that a break with Israel is likely if it does not end its war-making in the Gaza Strip. But Trump himself has remained mum—though he previously voiced his agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu that the war must end with Hamas’s destruction. According to recent reports, Trump’s new Arabian Gulf allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—are pressing Washington to end the Gaza War.

Palestinian suffering—and Muslim pressures within Western societies and from the Arab capitals—are now beginning to have an impact beyond America’s Ivy League campuses. Western public opinion and European governments are driven by daily TV clips from Gaza showing dead and dying women and children—though never dead and dying combat-age males. They are also influenced by worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground—Trump has even spoken hyperbolically of “a lot of people starving.” And finally they are alarmed at the prospect of a massive new push against Hamas by Israeli ground forces, designed, Netanyahu announced on 21 May, to end in open-ended Israeli rule over the whole Strip, together with the “voluntary” transfer of at least some of its population out of Gaza, as Trump proposed a few weeks ago.