In light of the sheer volume of reportage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the seeming intractability of that most controversial of geopolitical matters, there's something that it occurs to me to say. I am a Zionist. A left-wing Zionist, a peaceloving Zionist, a Zionist who believes in the establishment of a stable liberal democratic Palestinian polity, but a Zionist. What Zionism means to me is the belief in the right of the Jews to their national homeland in the land of Israel, with secular civic institutions and equality of rights and dignity for non-Jewish citizens but also a Jewish cultural character. I despise the anti-Black and anti-Arab racism in Israeli society, and I also reject the occupation of the lands won in the 1967 war, but I don't think these things corrupt the cause completely. My Unitarian Universalist, Bahá'í, and Inayati Sufi spiritual commitments make my Zionism different from that of your typical Jew, but I'm still within the fold. I am a Zionist. There's no escaping that.
And I think that, under the influence of Muslim supremacist activists and misinformed Leftist agitators, the world has chosen an ongoing and deliberate misunderstanding of the genuinely anticolonial nature of Zionism. I think that every Jew on the planet has the same claim to indigeneity in Israel as the First Nations and Inuit people have in Canada, or the Adivasi in Malaysia, or the Ainu in Japan. My position, speaking as at least an ethnic Jew, is that Arabs and other Muslims are our siblings but were also our conquerors, and we share with Bahá'ís, Copts, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, Yezidis, Yarsanis, Shabaks, Zoroastrians, Mandaeans, Hindus, Sikhs, Kalasha, Buddhists, Sudanese animists, secular Baloch and Imazighen and Kurds, and several other embattled peoples in places as far afield as Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Thailand, Bangladesh, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere (to say nothing of heterodox Muslim sects such as the Ahmadis, Bektashis, Mevlevis, Rifais, Mouridis, Turkish and Kurdish Alevis, and Sevener Nizari Ismailis), a direct threat to our lives from the global jihad ideology, which arises from several particularly malignant interpretations of the Holy Qur'án and the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, especially the saheeh ahadeeth (authenticated reports of what His life was like) and the earliest biography of Him, the one that was written by Ibn Ishaq and preserved (the technical word is “recension”) by Ibn Hisham. I accept that Muhammad was indeed a prophet, alaihi salaam, but I also believe that an evil and intransigent interpretation of the teachings of His Book is the main cause of the conflict in the Middle East.
This is not an apologia for Israeli sins. The Zionists have done terrible things to exacerbate the conflict, but I think anyone who believes they created it is ignorant, and some of those who believe this are deliberately so. And I am angry at the ongoing misrepresentation of Zionism as inherently fascist and the Israelis as inhuman, rather than mostly innocent.
I love the Palestinians and will never dehumanize them. Nor will I ever give up the fight against racism and “Non-Jewish lives don’t matter!” chauvinism among Jews; I feel obliged to note, as of April 2023, that the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Dudi Amsalem, Avi Maoz, Bezalel Smotrich, Benzi Gopstein, and Michael Ben-Ari, among other influential and popular Zionist extremist bigots, represent a specific fascist and evil interpretation of Judaism and Zionism which seeks to harm and subjugate the Palestinians, Palestinian-Israelis (and Israeli Arabs – some identify as one or the other, some as both), queer Israelis, non-Jewish Black African migrants to Israel, feminist Israeli women, and a variety of others in many of the same ways that the large majority of Muslim extremists who hate Israel wish to do the same for everyone who is not a straight cisgender male Muslim (including the Israelis themselves), and I feel obliged to angrily, contemptuously resist and oppose that fascist and supremacist of Judaism and Zionism with all my strength, the same way I make no bones about denouncing the Muslim version of this particular flavour of evil. I am willing to risk being erroneously called an Islamophobe to do that, and by the same token, I’m willing to risk being called a traitor or a self-hating Jew in order to do this. But the fact remains that I hate and reject any movement which hates and rejects the right of the Jews to live peacefully and happily in their home, Israel.