Nobody Cares About Your Opinion of Zionism
The war in Gaza is too frequently framed by narratives that obscure some more concrete political realities.
This war between Israel and Hamas started almost a year ago when Hamas massacred more than 1,000 civilians in Israel and kidnapped more than 200 people. Within a few days Israel responded with a brutal assault on Gaza that has resulted in tens of thousands of dead civilians, enormous damage to buildings and infrastructure in Gaza, more than a million displaced people and the threat of famine and disease that could kill tens of thousands of more people. From a military perspective, Israel has also killed thousands of Hamas fighters and weakened, but not destroyed, that organization’s ability to make war.
The impact of this war has gone much beyond Gaza and Israel. An almost global movement arose opposing Israel’s military action. What can broadly be called the Free Gaza movement included some who thought Israel’s military response was excessive and wanted a ceasefire, as well as many who were calling for the destruction of the State of Israel altogether. The Free Gaza movement also included some ugly antisemitism and far too many absurd denials of that antisemitism.
Supporters of Israel were cleaved as well between those who took what might be called the Schumer-Nadler position of support for the Jewish state, but harsh criticism of the Israeli leadership and its policies in Gaza and the West Bank on the one hand, and hard-liners who asserted that any criticism of Israel was prima facie antisemitic on the other.
From a tactical perspective, the Free Gaza movement made several significant mistakes. They either failed or had no interest in reigning in their most extreme members, so there was little effort to condemn or stop the antisemitism, which eventually, rightly or wrongly, drove too much of the coverage of the movement. Additionally, the failure of so many in the Free Gaza movement to condemn either condemn Hamas or the actions of October 7th limited the movement’s ability to appeal beyond its base.
A movement that began by denouncing the horrors of October 7th, consistently called for the release of the hostages and marginalized the antisemitic voices, rather than consistently defending them while also calling for an end to the war in Gaza, would have been much more popular with the American public and might have been much more successful in its efforts to change both American opinion and policy about the war, but that movement never emerged.
This helps explain one big reason this war has gone on so long and why the public discourse about it, from the streets and campuses all the way up to the White House, has been so virulent. The arguments have largely been not about how to end the war, or even about the interests of the two warring forces. Instead, the world seems to be arguing about the scope of history from biblical times through the destruction of the Second Temple, colonialism, the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel and the Six Day War.
The constant invocation of all that history has fueled a fight over competing narratives that seems to be driving both citizens and policy makers-and is often used by those policy makers to achieve their goals, thus making a difficult situation more combustible.
We saw this in the days following the attack of October 7th, when Joe Biden explained his support for Israel not simply by saying that a close American ally had been brutally attacked by an Iranian proxy, but by talking about Jewish history, the Holocaust and Golda Meir.
Similarly, those opposing the war focused largely on their understanding of the evils of Zionism and the belief that Jews had no ties to the land that is now the State of Israel until the late 19th century. The latter assertion is nonsensical, but rather than the making the clear argument that Israel’s response was brutal, excessive and murderous, the entry point to that reasonable view was to believe an absurd historical narrative.
Embracing these competing, and mutually exclusive narratives, makes it easier for supporters of both sides to avoid doing the difficult work of recognizing the complexity of the crisis.
The reality is that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people, and not just in Gaza since the war started, is unambiguously brutal, unjust and unsustainable, but it also a clear reality that when a powerful state is attacked by a group that has pledged to destroy that state, the powerful state will fight back and prioritize their safety over the human rights of their weaker foe. And your, my or anybody else’s opinion of the Nakba, Zionism or anything else cannot change that.
From the American perspective, it is much easier for supporters of Israel to wrap themselves in stories of Golda Meir, Israel’s early wars and the history of the Jewish people and antisemitism, than to recognize that Israel is a regional superpower whose corrupt leader is focused more on his political survival than what is good for Israel, has never been concerned with building a lasting peace and may deliberately drag the US into a larger conflict.
Similarly, those who protest the war believing they are fighting to end a genocide have created a much more comfortable moral framework than wrestling with their decision to back an Iranian proxy that foolishly, and deliberately, started a war against an American proxy, and that for Iran, and their proxy, dead Gazan civilians were a big part of their goals when they started that war.
The paradox here is that one cannot begin to understand this conflict without a deep understanding of the history of both the Jewish and Palestinian people. Nor can it be understood without the lenses of Zionism, the Nakba, colonialism and antisemitism. However, those approaches alone do little but elevate tensions and leave all sides trafficking in half-truths that ultimately lead nowhere.
That there are at least 4 definitions of the word that do not jibe, contributes to the confusion. One could write a book about it - or perhaps 4 pages, each page treating a different aspect.