The chief judge of the federal Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals used Zionism to argue for a religious exemption to Colorado’s anti-discrimination act.

Park Avenue synagogue uses images of occupied Jerusalem along with a psalm Jews recite in the days leading up to the High Holidays. “It’s a perfect one verse statement of contemporary synagogue Judaism. I have only one ask of God: Zionism.”

Many of the wounds of the Israeli occupation are bloodless and invisible. But like pieces of shrapnel lodged in the chest, they will eventually find their way to pierce the heart.

Marcelo Svirsky says Zionism is not a political ideology or movement in the narrow sense but a way of life that permeates all spheres of Jewish-Israeli culture and society. It can therefore be overcome only by means of a deep cultural transformation.

Understanding Palestine as a racial justice issue is to understand it as part of the broad fight for collective liberation.

The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has ventured into a territory– Judeophobia– that is nowadays mostly occupied by ardent Zionists intent on proving that Jew hatred is eternal and that the state of Israel is the only place where the Jews can feel safe. In today’s Europe, argues Sand, Judeophobia has been largely replaced by Islamophobia, while erstwhile Antisemites have become admirers of Israel, particularly of its way of “dealing with the Muslims”.

The opposition to a “pro-Israel” position is not a “pro-Palestine” position, but rather a decolonial justice position. This is the position that not only captures the reality of conditions in Palestine/Israel but also seeks to transform them into something new and something just.  

Maurice Samuel’s 1924 tract, “You Gentiles,” is cherished by antisemites and Zionists alike because it says that a Jew can never mix successfully in a non-Jewish world because the Jew’s concerns are more serious, and the gentile’s more playful, so the Jew will always be “a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him.” Samuel’s book insists on the impossibility of Jews and non-Jews living in stability and respect, and thus, the necessity of Jews living in their own land.

Zionism has not yet murdered Judaism but it has undermined its moral and historical integrity. Just as Israel must de-Zionize in order to finally find its place in the Middle East, so, too, must Jews abroad de-Zionize in order to reclaim their own traditions, experiences and communal validity.

The myth of victim in danger of extinction by Palestinians, has colored the thinking of many older generations Jews who maintain an allegiance to Zionism, Lillian Rosengarten writes. To look at Zionism with open eyes, one observes a form of virulent Nationalism perpetrated on Palestinians who represent for Zionists an inferior race, unwanted and demonized in the dream of a Jewish State for
Jews only.