Let’s talk about religion.
Those aren’t really words I’m accustomed to typing. I grew up in a Catholic family that was deeply involved in a “charismatic Christian community” (a so-called “covenant community” called the “Word of God (WOG)”) but I rejected religion at a pretty young age. A lot of people in my age group were traumatized by the rigid authoritarian structure and practices of the WOG. For me that manifest as a lot of anger toward religion and religious believers that lasted until about my mid 30’s.
In my mid-30’s (early 2000’s) I found an online discussion forum called the “Internet Infidels Discussion Board (IIDB)” that was run by an organization called “The Secular Web”. IIDB was the first “community” I had ever found where believers were a minority and where I didn’t feel judged and marginalized for being a non-believer. There were also a lot of really smart and educated people who posted there, so I was able to learn a lot about science, culture, history, philosophy, and yes, religions.
One of the most valuable things I learned at IIDB was how to argue. Not in the colloquial sense—we all learn how to argue the first time our parents tell us to do something we don’t like—but in the more formal sense of analyzing claims using reason and logic. In particular, how to tell a good argument from a bad one. For example “you’re wrong because you’re ugly” is a bad argument (an example of the ad hominem fallacy), whereas “you’re wrong because one of your premises is objectively untrue” is a good argument because it is logically sound and valid.
I was only a member of IIDB for a short time, but for various reasons I ended up co-founding a new discussion forum that attracted quite a few of the former IIDB folks. By then my opinion of religion and religious people had evolved. I went from thinking religion was probably the cause of all that is wrong in the world and religious people were idiots, to believing there are pros and cons to religious belief and practices, and realizing plenty of people far smarter and more educated than me are believers.
All of this is just context for the real point of this post, to talk about the myth that Zionism is Judaism. I wrote in a previous post that I was in a book club where we’re reading Ilan Pappé’s Ten Myths About Israel. I volunteered to give a summarization of chapter three—which is about the myth that Zionism is Judaism.
Probably the most pervasive (and toxic) outcome of this myth is the belief that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” (as resolved by overwhelming bipartisan consensus in the US House of Representatives as recently as last December1).
There are many problems with conflating Zionism, which is a political project, with Judaism, which is a religion. First and foremost, not all people who practice Judaism support Zionism, and many (some say most) Zionists are evangelical Christians. In fact according to Israeli historian Anita Shapira, it was Christians who first had the idea way back in 1840. It wasn’t until the 1880’s that Jewish folks adopted the idea.
The book is small and meant only as an introduction to the topic, so needless to say it was not possible for Professor Pappé to go in depth on the history and character of Judaism itself2, much less Zionism and the relationship between the two. However that fact alone helps clarify the absurdity of equating Zionism and Judaism.
Zionism is a easy to define: It is a political project to establish (and now maintain) a Jewish state in Palestine3. Judaism, on the other hand, is a very complicated topic not least because similar to Christianity, there are many different strands of Judaism and for as long as the Zionist project has been in play there have been Jewish people who oppose it.
Another complex topic is the relationship between identifying as “Jewish” and practicing Judaism. I always knew there were some Jewish people who were not religious, but it never made a lot of sense to me. What makes an atheist Jewish? What does it mean to have a secular democracy (as Israel claims to be) that is “Jewish”. It would make sense if it were a theocracy, but it claims not to be. Are they relying on the same specious race science that white supremacists fall back on?
The most surprising thing I learned from this reading is that the early Zionists fully intended to re-define Judaism as Zionism. They literally wanted to strip Judaism of its religious aspects and transform it into a secular, modernist, nationalist project. It’s no wonder that a majority of the religious leaders initially opposed it, and many still do. Of course this makes it even more absurd when people blame the conflict on differing religious beliefs between the Jews and Muslims.
In summary, anti-Zionism is opposition to a political project that entails the creation (and maintenance) of a Jewish state in historic Palestine, while antisemitism is hatred of Jewish people on the basis of their identity, be it cultural or religious. Thus not only is Zionism clearly not the same as Judaism, it isn’t synonymous with “Jewishness” either. So the claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is plainly untrue.
“Text - H.Res.894 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Strongly condemning and denouncing the drastic rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world." Congress.gov, Library of Congress, 5 December 2023, https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-resolution/894/text.
For more detailed analysis see Pappé’s seminal The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The region that Zionists refer to alternately as “Israel”, or “Judea and Samaria”. There is currently an internationally recognized state called Israel on that land, as well as regions called Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan Heights which are designated as ‘occupied territories’ because the state of Israel maintains military and economic control there.
Thank you Tom for a well prepared and delivered presentation at the book club and the article here on substack.