You can be Jewish without being a Zionist, but you can’t be a Zionist without being Jewish.
According to the Conversation:
As the Israel-Hamas war continues, there’s been a lot of discussion around Zionism.
Put simply, Zionism is a nationalist movement that advocates for a homeland for the Jewish people in the Biblical Land of Israel. It is the organisation of ideas that actively sought and achieved the existence of the Israeli state in 1948.
Basically, political Zionism underpins the country we today call Israel.
It’s a movement that encompasses a broad spectrum of political beliefs with common objectives at its centre. But perhaps more than other political movements, Zionism has evolved over time.
There is more on that site about the role of Zionism in today’s Israeli government.
Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine. [snip]
The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land which outweighed the rights of the Arabs, which were “of no moral or historical significance.” According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation “there was no such thing as Palestinians” was a cornerstone of Zionist policy initiated by Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and continued by their successors. [snip]
In order to achieve a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement was faced with a problem, namely the presence of the local Arab (and primarily non-Jewish) population. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental practical importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term “transfer” as a euphemism for the removal, or ethnic cleansing, of the Arab Palestinian population. [snip]
The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with the demographic minority status of the Jews in Europe) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.
The Wikipedia article goes on to explain how the Zionists rationalized establishing Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians. Apartheid refers to the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalized racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights. Apartheid is a crime against humanity punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Amnesty international’s website provides extensive coverage of the way Israel, under Zionist influence, has instituted apartheid against the Palestinians, including:
In May 2021, Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, began protesting against Israel’s plan to forcibly evict them from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the families are refugees, who settled in Sheikh Jarrah after being forcibly displaced around the time of Israel’s establishment as a state in 1948. Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities, who use discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis.
In response to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah, thousands of Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) held their own protests in support of the families, and against their shared experience of fragmentation, dispossession, and segregation. These were met with excessive and deadly force by Israeli authorities with thousands injured, arrested and detained.
The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries – all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.
This is apartheid.
Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.
Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.
According to Wikipedia, Judaism is a
religion that comprises the collective spiritual, cultural, and legal traditions of the Jewish people. Religious Jews regard Judaism as their means of observing the Mosaic covenant, which was established between God and the Israelites, their ancestors. The religion is considered one of the earliest monotheistic religions in the world.
Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not simply a faith-based religion, but an orthoprax and ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, practice, and identity. Jewish culture covers many aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, family, social customs and lifestyles, music and dance. Some elements of Jewish culture come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations, and others still from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community. Before the 18th century, religion dominated virtually all aspects of Jewish life, and infused culture. Since the advent of secularization, wholly secular Jewish culture emerged likewise.
Israel’s political foundation in Zionism is not the same as the Jewish religion or culture.
According to an article in the Jewish Voice for Peace:
Before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children. Israeli soldiers and settlers were rampaging through the Occupied West Bank setting fire to villages, supported by the most far-right government in Israeli history. They forced entire Palestinian villages to flee, to abandon the homes and land in their family for generations. Palestinian children were regularly dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. The Israeli government was tightening its 16 year illegal blockade of land, air and water – suffocating the lives of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Ten-year-olds in Gaza had already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives. As news broke on October 7th, we immediately understood that Israel would exploit the tragic deaths of its Jewish citizens to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinians.
For decades, the Israeli government, and the U.S., and other western governments have shut down any attempts to hold the Israeli government accountable for these violations of Palestinian rights. I have seen Palestinian resistance to oppression ruthlessly repressed, from the criminalization of boycotts to Israeli snipers murdering protestors at nonviolent Palestinian marches in Gaza. The Israeli government has jailed Palestinian poets for posting poems to Facebook, and criminalized prominent human rights organizations.
In the U.S., Israel’s largest supplier of military funding and weapons, every new atrocity has been met with impunity. This has been true for decades, as it was this year.
How much different it would be today if the Zionists had not won, and Palestine remained a country open to both Jews and Palestinians, and anyone else who wanted to live there. Now, Israel exists as a country rooted in apartheid, and religious/cultural Jews who are citizens of other countries are being targeted because people don’t know the history of Israel’s foundation in the bigotry of Zionism, which most cultural and religious Jews do not support.
As a non-Jew, I can be against the government of the country of Israel and not be anti-Semitic; I can support the right of Jewish people to be respected, supported, and safe, and still despise what the powerful Zionist Israeli government has done to the disempowered Palestinians over the decades. If I were I Jew living in America today, I would voice my distance from the policies of the Israeli government, and educate the public via every media possible, that there is a difference between supporting the government of today’s Israel and being committed to my religious and cultural Jewish heritage.