Zionism, Anti-Zionism, and Nationalisms: A Critical Engagement

• In Event: Ideational Contributions to State-Building

Abstract

With Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack of unprecedented violence against Israel and Israel’s unprecedented response that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including Hamas fighters and civilians, many people around the world have joined an anti-Zionist movement grounded upon the ideology of anti-Zionism. In a straightforward sense, members of the anti-Zionist movement reject the legitimacy of the State of Israel, while their opponents support Israel’s legitimacy. Despite this fundamental disagreement between them, the two sides do agree on some basic, relevant facts. Both Zionists and anti-Zionists understand that a State of Israel exists: It has a government, an army, cities, schools, ambassadors, and embassies, and all the other trappings of a state. Both Zionists and anti-Zionists agree with the historical fact that the United Nations recognized the partition of what had been British Mandatory Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. That they disagree on the legitimacy of that UN decision is, of course, central to the conflict between them. But there is an even more fundamental conceptual disconnect between them: the meaning of Zionism itself. This is not to say that the differences are crystalized so that the supporters of Zionism have one definition of Zionism and the opponents have another. Within the big tents of supporters of Zionism and the opponents of it, different factions hold variants of what Zionism is. In the history of what has been called “modern Zionism,” the “Revisionist Zionists” and the “Labor Zionists” overlapped considerably in the views of Zionism’s core goals and values, but they also differed on a number of its tenets. The legacy of those conflicts continues to play out today in Israeli party politics. A similar dynamic occurs among the anti-Zionists: Neturei Karta’s conception of Zionism is not the same as Hezbollah’s, but their definitions still overlap to a considerable degree. The Zionism of Christian Zionists is yet a third set of definitions that is not completely uniform but nevertheless has coherence. Furthermore, to understand these different definitions of Zionism, we also need to unpack the role that nationalism has played and continues to play in Zionism, as well as how religion intersects with national identities. This paper will tease out these conceptual differences and contextualize their meanings for the conflict today.

Author

• Renee Marlin-Bennett, Johns Hopkins University