For decades, Joe Biden has proudly declared that he is a Zionist, and he has repeated that claim since Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel. But for the student anti-war protests gripping the US, the words “Zionist” and “Zionism” have become a watchword – pejorative and emblematic of the violent state policies driving the war on Gaza.
On social media and in the streets, critics no longer call out supporters of the state of Israel as “pro-Israel”: they call them Zionist. Some university encampments have posted signs saying: “Zionists not allowed.”
Student protesters say that their criticisms of Zionism are rooted in the state of Israel’s displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Pro-Israel activists have responded by defending the term. “If the last six months on campus have taught us anything, it is that a large and vocal population of the Columbia community does not understand the meaning of Zionism,” a group of more than 500 Columbia University students recently wrote. “We are proud to be Zionists.”
In the emotions stirred by the war, the late 19th-century ideology that underpins the state of Israel is getting as much attention as the state itself. But it doesn’t have a meaning that everyone agrees on.
The Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl launched the First Zionist Congress in 1897. His project for a new homeland for Jews with self-rule came in reaction to the rampant, violent antisemitism in Europe and was shaped by political ideas of that time. He became committed to a Jewish state in Palestine, which he called “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”. Israel would be founded in 1948, several decades after his death.
Today, a generation of students emphasizes what they see as the settler-colonial nature of Herzl’s vision.
The shift in opinions on Zionism has been particularly confusing for many Jewish Americans. Though 58% of Jewish Americans describe themselves as Zionist, according to a 2022 survey conducted by Carleton University political scientist Mira Sucharov, the term means vastly different things to different people. A majority see Zionism as signifying a connection to Israel (about 70%), and about just as many view it as a belief in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (72%), while a small minority describe it as “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel” (10%). Recent polling of Americans more broadly shows that many are unfamiliar with the term.
But for Palestinians, the notion that there’s a version of Zionism under which they can live in dignity is contradicted by history, because Zionism underpins the policies that drove their mass displacement from what became Israel in 1948 and has continued to displace them since. “When people think of Zionism now, they look at Gaza,” Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said. “This is what it means: that you want to have an ethnically exclusive state,” he said. “It’s ugly.”
Arguably for the first time, a Palestinian perspective on Zionism is taking center stage in mainstream discourse. “A lot more young people, including young Jews, are listening to their Palestinian friends and classmates who are saying: ‘This is what Zionism means to us,’” said Simone Zimmerman, the media director of Diaspora Alliance, an international organization focused on combating antisemitism and its weaponization. This explains how terms like “ethnostate”, “Jewish supremacy” and “settler-colonialism” have become central to the protests.
After the Holocaust, Zionism became a core tenet of American Jewish establishment organizations. American Jewry’s connections to Israel deepened especially after the 1967 and 1973 wars. In that era, Jewish Americans saw Israel as a bastion of liberal values, and the American Jewish community mustered immense philanthropic efforts in support of Israel. Most Jewish education programs, synagogues and community groups taught Zionism as basically inseparable from Judaism.
“I am a Zionist,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently wrote, “because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries.”
But there have always been Jewish communities that rejected Zionism – from secular communists to strands of Orthodox Jewry. Today, anti-Zionist Jewish students are more visible and have played an outsized role in the protests against Israel’s Gaza war.
The student tent city at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, for example, has been holding teach-ins on the history of Zionism, highlighting narratives that many of the Jewish students participating in the encampment had not gotten in their own formal Jewish education.
They echo grassroots organizations that have been embracing the moniker of anti-Zionism to, as they put it, reclaim Judaism from its association with Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace has been a force behind protests that delayed Biden’s State of the Union address in March and interrupted his recent appearances in Manhattan. Jay Saper, an organizer with JVP, pointed out that the movement is also building “an anti-Zionist Jewish community, a Jewish community beyond Zionism”.
These views still represent a relatively small proportion of US public opinion, but the protesters have forced a new conversation about Jewish Americans’ relationship to Israel.
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Israel’s enduring occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has also shifted the conversation on the left, which increasingly views Zionism itself as being essential to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the war on Gaza as a logical conclusion of Zionism.
The partition of land into two states – Israel and Palestine – was once consensus, viewed as a way to preserve a Jewish state that would not indefinitely rule over the Palestinians. But two decades of land-for-peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization collapsed under the Obama administration and have never been restarted.
The failure of the peace process to produce an independent Palestinian state, alongside perpetually expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, became proof for many observers that subsequent Israeli governments were never serious about those negotiations.
Israelis and Palestinians, especially those younger than 35, are less likely to support two states. A majority of Middle East scholars, according to a 2023 poll, don’t think a Palestinian state is possible.
The breakdown of a process toward a Palestinian state has also come as Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented what they have found to be increasingly repressive apartheid policies in the occupied territories, which challenge the very notion that Israel is a democracy.
Though only a small portion of Jewish Americans see Zionism as “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel”, Palestinians, including citizens of Israel, live a very different reality. This has put liberal Zionists in America in a tenuous position. Under ever more extreme right-wing Israeli governments, the long-simmering tensions between a Jewish and a democratic state have come to a boiling point. “The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades – a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews – has failed,” Peter Beinart wrote in 2020. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.”
Beinart now describes himself as a cultural Zionist, drawing upon debates in the 1940s that held out the possibility of a binational state that also supported a growth of Jewish and Hebrew culture in Mandatory Palestine. But a version of Zionism in practice that doesn’t favor Jewish interests has yet to materialize, and it’s not clear what it would look like.
Can Israel be separated from Zionism? “In principle, nobody has an objection to the Jewish people having a state,” Makdisi, of UCLA, said. “The problem is, where do they choose to have this state? And under what circumstances, and who is being asked to pay the price for it?”
“Jewish people don’t have a right that overrides the Palestinian people’s rights,” he continued.
The rhetoric common on the left today is also perhaps part of a more maximalist shift toward Palestinian liberation. Language of “resistance” has figured prominently in the anti-war protests, in contrast to an earlier emphasis on the co-existence of Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
Many of the protesters believe that a binational state with equal rights for Palestinians is the only way forward. “People have come to the conclusion that reform has not worked and radical action is the solution to make change for a just and peaceful world,” Allie Ryave, a Harvard Law School student protesting in the university’s encampment, said.
Many American Jews feel under attack by the attention on Zionism right now. They may identify with a range of paradigms – secular Zionism, religious Zionism, labor Zionism, liberal Zionism or other forms of Jewish nationalism – now collapsed into a single derisive word.
But Palestinian scholars say the Zionism that the protest movement has put at the center is simply the state of Israel’s overt ideology, which asserts the dominance of Jews over the land. “Zionism as practiced is not an abstraction,” Makdisi said. “It happened in the land of Palestine. It happened at the expense – and it’s happening at the expense – of the Palestinian people.”
At Harvard University’s protest encampment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sophomore Violet Barron said that she defers to her Palestinian classmates and peers in thinking through these complex issues. “It took watching the scale of devastation in Gaza to understand what a staunch belief in Zionism can justify,” she said.
