You could not get a better picture of Zionism than from two recent events. Israel bombed a consulate in a foreign country – Syria – killing top Iranian military officers, among others, and Israel supporters in the U.S. forced the cancelation of the valedictorian address at the University of Southern California because the speaker opposes Israeli genocide in Gaza.These actions are consistent. They are expressions of a maximalist ideology that operates on a global level to support the Israeli regime. That ideology, of course, is Zionism, the belief that Jews need a state in order to be safe. Today Zionism threatens political freedom in the United States and international order. It threatens the political tradition of liberalism in the United States by compelling Democratic politicians to pay for more bombs to advance a genocide.
Zionism destroys every good thing in its path. After 150 years of struggle and practice, Zionism is dedicated to one purpose, the neverending subjugation of Palestinians, who resist their persecution.
There is only one way to fight this ideology. Those who oppose it must explain the truth to Americans: Zionism is racist. Its supporters must be called out and cornered and discredited—as adherents of a Jim Crow ideology.
I have always said that I might have been a Zionist in an earlier age. Zionism was a perfectly understandable ideology in light of European oppression of Jews. Jews left Europe as refugees, not supremacists. If Zionism had focused only on Jewish safety it might be a tolerable ideology today.
But from the beginning maximalist Zionists won out. They wanted more land with fewer Palestinians. For at least 75 years now this is the Zionist credo, and they repeatedly used terrorism to achieve that goal.
–In the 1920s the socialist leader Chaim Arlosoroff sought to advance ideas of national coexistence with Palestinians. He was murdered on the beach in Tel Aviv in 1933 by Zionist militias that later produced the highest officials in Israel.
–In 1949 a U.N. diplomat, Folke Bernadotte, who had saved thousands of Jews from Nazis during the war, sought to advance plans to keep Jerusalem an international city, as designated by the UN Partition plan. He was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Zionist gang that – again – later produced the highest officials in Israel.
–In the 1990s a Labor Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, declared that Israel would only have peace if it returned land to Palestinians so as to allow them to have sovereignty. Rabin was murdered by a rightwinger who enjoys deep political support to this day.
These murders arose from a consistent program: Israeli leaders have again and again told us that they will not accept a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.