The crisis of Zionism and the future of Palestine
Ilan Pappé
Editor’s Note: The Palestine Chronicle is publishing exclusively [on 15 July 2026] the full text of a recent speech delivered by renowned Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappé at the 2026 Marxism Festival in London. In this wide-ranging address, Pappé examines the historical evolution of Zionism, arguing that its current brutality reflects a profound structural crisis rather than enduring strength. The text has been lightly edited for clarity while preserving the author’s arguments and voice.
Zionism is in crisis, and that crisis has given rise to a more violent, racist, and brutal form of it. This follows a familiar dialectic of history: a regime’s final chapter is often its most vicious.
As activists, we must first recognize that the inhumanity unfolding in Palestine today is also a symptom of the looming collapse of those who perpetrate it. This may offer us some hope, but it brings no comfort to those who suffer its consequences.
We must therefore pursue two goals: to shorten this period as much as possible, and to curb its brutality through civic and legal action, as well as solidarity with Palestinians on the ground who are defending themselves against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.
What is Zionism Today?
Like any ideology, Zionism consists both of enduring principles and of their ongoing translation into changing realities on the ground. That translation shifts with circumstances: the size of the ideological movement, the level of resistance it faces, the strength of the global and regional coalitions supporting it, its material and human resources, and its internal cohesion.
Zionism’s core principles recast Judaism as a form of European nationalism; one that could not be fulfilled in Europe and therefore had to be pursued in Palestine. Its claim to Palestine was expressed in religious terms, even though the movement was secular and aimed to secularize and modernize Jewish life through the colonization of Palestine.
The paradox of appealing to a divine authority the movement itself did not accept in order to justify colonization was made to seem logical by presenting Zionism as a response to European antisemitism. Its early supporters, including both antisemites and a minority of Jews, accepted the claim that Jews could become equal Europeans only by being pushed out of Europe and assisted in building a new Europe in the land that had rejected them.
This fragile logic of turning religion into nationalism in response to European antisemitism, by claiming another people’s homeland long inhabited by an indigenous nation, was presented to the world as both rational and moral. Some still accept this narrative today, whether from ignorance or cynicism.
Even then, as now, selling this bizarre logic required a powerful lobby.
In Zionism’s early years, the idea was easier to promote because it emerged at a time when the immorality of colonialism was widely ignored. More importantly, from the start, Zionist planners understood that turning the idea into a project on the ground in Palestine would require force and coercion.
This exposes one of Zionism’s central falsehoods: force was not adopted in response to Palestinian resistance; the settlers arrived already prepared to impose themselves on the native people of Palestine.
This was not a new European logic: unwanted or unwelcome Europeans had often been settled outside the continent, usually in lands already inhabited by native peoples. These projects were never merely benevolent attempts to create havens for European outcasts; they were also profoundly violent efforts to remove indigenous populations in order to realize those visions.
Scholars have long described these ventures as settler-colonial projects, distinguishing them from more institutional forms of imperial colonialism, which established colonies in pursuit of European land, capital, labor, and global power. Yet the two were deeply intertwined: classical colonialism and settler colonialism often served one another’s ambitions to Europeanize the non-European world by force, frequently masking that violence as a civilizing mission grounded in Enlightenment values.