What is Zionism?

Plus, our fascism distraction

The student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are dominating the news as if almost nothing else is going on – including the war itself. This is only a slight exaggeration. Yet despite the wall-to-wall coverage, some of what the students are saying is getting lost in the uproar over their methods – encampments, occupying academic buildings, hoisting the Palestinian flag – and the police crackdowns. So let’s try to focus on their words – or one word in particular: Zionism.

In interviews and signage, the protesters are denouncing Zionism. I’ve heard students use such terms as Zionist occupation forces or Zionist regime. At Columbia University one night, the student-campers cried out, “Zionists have entered the camp!” To these supporters of the Palestinian cause, Zionism carries no positive connotation. It is a form of violent settler colonialism bent on ethnically cleansing Arabs from their homelands. Or, as I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, a poster stuck to a lamppost in my neighborhood declared, “Zionism = Racism = Fascism.”

What is Zionism? This question was the title of Tuesday’s episode with political scientist Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the Israel-Palestinian conflict for half a century. A better question is what was Zionism before 1948? How is it different from Zionism today? Or maybe we should discuss different Zionisms, as no ideology is a monolith. And when it comes to settler colonialism, Lustick says there is no one-size-fits-all definition that can help us understand Zionism’s history.

“There is much more variation within the category than people appreciate. You don’t learn very much by saying a country is settler colonialist. Even the United States is a settler colony. Canada is. New Zealand is,” says Lustick, who off the top of his head also listed Bolivia, Australia, South Africa (under apartheid), Algeria (under French rule), Kenya and Rhodesia (under British colonialism), and the Lakota Sioux when they ruled what is now Kansas and Nebraska. 

Settler colonialism is “the use of settlers to extend the domain of an existing state, or, in the Zionist case, to actually build a state somewhere it didn’t exist before. But what happens with settlers so often is they turn on the country that tried to use them. The American Revolution is an example of a settler colony that turned on its creator. The Boers in South Africa did the same thing to the British,” says Lustick, who considers himself a lifelong Zionist even though he avoids using the term nowadays because it has become so fraught. 

“The Zionist movement was created to help Jews solve their European problem. And the Europeans helped the Jews do that because they wanted to solve their ‘Jewish problem’ and get them out of Europe. But, as is usually the case with settlers, the project turns on its progenitors. In the Israeli case, we’re finding out that instead of Israeli behavior making American Jews feel safer, it makes them feel much less safe. They feel attacked and under pressure because of… the predicament created by a Zionist movement that was partially successful.”

What Lustick means by “predicament” is that the “partial success” of the Zionist movement in 1948 left hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs expelled from their land and unable to return. These Arabs didn’t merely float away to other continents; they lived in refugee camps in Gaza or Lebanon or Jordan where they could see their old villages wiped out. Palestinians engaged in decades of armed resistance and terrorism to try to reclaim Palestine. After the June 1967 war, Israeli military occupation policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip led to the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in 1987.

More recently, Israel maintained a land, air, and sea blockade against the Gaza Strip even as Benjamin Netanyahu allowed Qatari money to flow into Hamas’ coffers – a key piece of Netanyahu’s strategy to keep the Palestinian leadership divided between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. This approach to the problem of Palestinian misery, poverty, and statelessness exploded on Oct. 7, 2023, as Hamas militants butchered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 253 others. I will return to Hamas’ motives later in this newsletter.

As Lustick wrote to me after our podcast conversation was published, “Israel/Zionism is in a very unusual category of settler colonial states — a project that was partially successful [because] it did not wipe out or render politically insignificant the aboriginal population. Instructively, it is the only state in that category that still exists. That helps explain why it sticks out like a sore thumb. Imagine what the US would be like if there were 350 million ‘Native Americans’ inside the country and another 200 million on its borders who wanted their ‘land and country’ back.”

Zionism began as a national liberation movement for Europe’s Jews in the late nineteenth century. It was based on the notion that antisemitism was so embedded in society that Jews would never be fully tolerated or safe even if they assimilated. Zionism gained steam after Tsar Alexander III cracked down (the progroms) on Jews whom he blamed for his father’s assassination.

As Lustick and I discuss in the podcast, Jewish emigration to Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire) accelerated after the First World War under the British mandate. The Arabs of Palestine were vehemently opposed to Zionist settlement, and the British were losing patience with the increasing violence between Jews and Arabs. Check out this short, fascinating clip of an unnamed Arab man in 1936 explaining why his people were so angry at the British. It was the Balfour Declaration! 

As far as what the fanatical faction leading Hamas believed it might “accomplish” by attacking Israel on Oct. 7, I must thank Ian Lustick for sharing this remarkable piece of journalism by Shlomi Eldar for Haaretz. For years this faction planned what they believed would be the strike to finish off the Jewish state, which would then be “divided into cantons.” This “messianic insanity” alienated other Hamas figures and Palestinian elites, who fled to Egypt to avoid what they knew would be massive Israeli retaliation once Hamas spilled blood.

Our fascism distraction

The other morning, MSNBC's Morning Joe was on the television when I heard one of the hosts or panelists say the wall-to-wall coverage of the campus protests is distracting Americans from a far more urgent priority: stopping the rise of fascism. I may have sighed loudly.

Listen, I enjoy discussing political ideologies. Understanding ideas and motivations is critical. But the fascism debate about Donald Trump and the Republican Party is running on fumes – or at least it should be running on fumes. 

First, if you missed it last week, here is my review of “Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America” edited by historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. You can buy the book here if you can’t find it in your local bookstore or library.

Second, one of the book’s contributors, the historian Daniel Bessner, was my guest in Thursday’s episode. Bessner co-hosts the American Prestige podcast. We debated the definition of fascism, and briefly talked about whether ordinary citizens care about what some intellectuals and scholars spend so much of their Twitter time arguing over. Bessner and I disagree on how to define fascism, although we find common ground concerning what fascism isn’t. Trump is not a fascist. 

As I said in the podcast, the work of Oxford-Brookes historian Roger Griffin has influenced my understanding of what makes fascism distinct from other right-wing (or any authoritarian) political ideologies. Griffin's analysis is persuasive because he did the work studying the writings and ideas of interwar (1919-1939) fascist ideologues. He identified the importance of national rebirth in the fascist mind (palingenesis). Thus, when we weigh what made fascist movements distinct, we should focus on the centrality of the rebirth myth and the purposes it was put toward.

Fascists were cultural and political revolutionaries who wanted to remake society on an "anthropological" level. It was not mere rhetoric when they spoke of a new Italy or a new Germany. For the Nazis, the basis for the new society – the organic community – was conceived in racial/biological terms. The methods to cleanse society of the racially or genetically inferior (to Nazi eyes) were extremely radical: the murders of the mentally ill, for instance, in the euthanasia program.

The point is, the Nazis didn't want to restore an old Germany before it was ruined by modernity. They wished to create a new, alternative (anti-liberal) modernity by mobilizing, not suppressing, revolutionary populist impulses. This is one thing that differentiates fascism from other forms of autocracy or authoritarianism. Understanding ideology and motivations is critical! Just pointing to ugly stuff like police crackdowns on protesters and calling it fascism won't do.

Professor Griffin adds, “Nationalism, populism, and revolutionary longings for a new order can be found all over the place in history and, of course, there are rarely clean breaks between systems. Even in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, there were elements of continuity. But it is the particular mythic force of the compound of ultranationalism with the rebirth myth that makes something fascist according to my ideal type.”

What’s next?

On Tuesday it will be the next installment of my monthly elections series. Sean Wilentz and Jim Oakes will return to the podcast to talk about the elections of 1860 and 1864, with some comments on whether Americans today are reliving the 1850s. 

Thursday’s episode will return to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and another word often heard at the campus protests: intifada. My guest will be Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute. We will talk about the history of the First and Second Intifadas, and delve into some difficult questions. When is violent resistance justified? When does resistance become terrorism? Did either intifada produce any positive results for Palestinians? If armed resistance will never work, how should Palestinians go about trying to achieve their national aspirations? The last question pertains to my first encounter with Elgindy. In November we talked about the thirtieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords.

What am I reading?

I just started Steve Coll’s “The Achilles Trap” which is about Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the 2003 invasion. I hope to interview the author later this month.