I am a Zionist

Most of us are familiar with the word Zionist. We see it constantly thrown around on social media, used as an insult, a slur and an accusation.
Depending on who’s using it, a Zionist is apparently a racist, a colonialist, an extremist, a supremacist, an apartheid supporter, an oppressor, or someone involved in some dark international conspiracy.

In fact, the word is used so often, and with such hostility, that many people now just assume that it has negative connotations. They don’t stop to question it – they just hear “Zionist” and instinctively recoil.

For a long time I suffered from a version of that myself.

Despite being a supporter of Israel and the Jewish people for most of my adult life, I was uncomfortable with the word Zionist because I’d heard it used negatively for so long that I had unconsciously allowed that discomfort to colour my own thinking.

However, that changed in 2017 after meeting Perry Trotter, one of New Zealand’s foremost advocates for Israel and the Jewish people.

At the time, Perry was producing a video series called I Am a Zionist, featuring well-known New Zealanders and international figures proudly explaining why they identified with that term. I remember being confused by the project at the time – why would someone willingly embrace a label that seemed to attract so much hostility?

The answer was simple: almost everything I’d heard about Zionism was wrong.

Perry didn’t persuade me to become a Zionist. He persuaded me to discover that I already was one.

The word “Zion” is one of the oldest names associated with Jerusalem. Originally, it referred to the hill on which King David established his city, before becoming a poetic and biblical name for Jerusalem itself and, ultimately, for the land of Israel. So Zionism a simply a descriptor for the movement focused on Zion – the centre of the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

That movement isn’t new. It stretches back almost two thousand years and has been carried by generation after generation of Jews, praying for a return to their ancient home down through the centuries. However, it wasn’t till the eighteenth century that it began to take shape as a political movement – culminating in the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, under the leadership of Hungarian Jews Theodor Herzl. That event gave structure, language and leadership to an aspiration that had existed for millennia.

At its heart, Zionism was remarkably simple. It was the belief that the Jewish people, like every other people on earth, should have the right to return to and live in their ancestral homeland.

That’s it.

No international conspiracy. No plan for world domination. No racial supremacy. No ambition to conquer other peoples. No blueprint for oppression. Those slurs have never formed part of Zionism. They are later attachments by people who wanted to turn an aspiration into something sinister.

So why ‘Zionism’? Why not ‘Israelism’? Because the word Zionism existed decades before the modern State of Israel. When the movement adopted that name, there was no Israeli state. Nobody knew what a future Jewish state might eventually be called. Israel, Judah and Judea were all possibilities discussed at different times. So the movement wasn’t named after a country that didn’t yet exist. It was named after Zion – the ancient biblical name that had symbolised the Jewish homeland for thousands of years.

But then history then took an extraordinary turn. At the time political Zionism was taking shape, the land known then as Palestine was a neglected outpost of the Ottoman Empire. The name itself came from the Roman renaming of Judea as Syria Palaestina after the Jewish revolts, a deliberate attempt to weaken the connection between the Jewish people and their land.

For centuries, Jews had continued to live there, and others returned in waves through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They weren’t returning to a foreign place. They were returning to the land from which their people had come.

Then came the First World War. The Ottoman Empire sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary. When that alliance was defeated, the Ottomans lost their Middle Eastern territories. That wasn’t unusual in history – Empires that start or join wars and lose them often lose territory – the difference this time was that the newly formed League of Nations placed these former Ottoman lands under mandates, giving Britain and France responsibility for administering and reshaping much of the region.

France received Syria and Lebanon. Britain received responsibility for Mesopotamia, from which it created Iraq, a Palestinian state it called ‘Transjordan’ (now Jordan) east of the Jordan River and the remainder of the territory of ‘Palestine’.

In other words, Palestine was not some isolated exception. It was one part of a much larger post-war settlement in which the old Ottoman Middle East was carved into the countries and territories that became the modern Middle East.

Within that framework, the Jewish national home became a real political possibility. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had already stated that Britain viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The League of Nations Mandate later incorporated that commitment into international law. Despite the fact that the British went on to make a complete botch of it – the basic principle had been recognised: the Jewish people had a legitimate legal, historic and national claim to their ancient homeland. This is the essence of Zionism.

Not a conspiracy, a colonial plot, or a secret plan to dominate anyone. Just the return home of a people scattered for centuries.

That is what Zionism meant.

The problem is that the word has since been weaponised by people who want it to mean something else. Today, when critics spit out the word “Zionist”, they are rarely using it as a neutral historical term. They use it as a container into which they pour every accusation they can find: racism, colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, supremacy, greed, manipulation, global control.

That’s the trick.

They take a word that means Jewish national self-determination and load it with every ugly accusation imaginable. Then they use that loaded version of the word to attack Jews and those who support them while pretending they’re only making a political point.
It’s not honest. It’s not clever. It’s just old-fashioned antisemitism and bigotry wearing a slightly newer jacket – and we shouldn’t be buying into it.

I no longer do. Now, I proudly wear the label: I’m a Zionist.

• If you believe that the Jewish people have the same right to national self-determination as every other people on earth.
• If you believe that the Jews have the right to live in their historic homeland.
• If you reject the grotesque double standard that grants every other people the dignity of national identity but treats Jewish identity as uniquely suspicious.

You’re a Zionist too.

Don’t be afraid of the word. Wear it proudly.

Leave a comment below with four simple words:

I am a Zionist….

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