What is Zionism?

Zionism is the movement for Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel: the idea that Jews are a people, not only a religious community, and that like other peoples they are entitled to sovereignty in their historic homeland. As an organized political movement it dates to the late nineteenth century, associated above all with Theodor Herzl and the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, though the attachment it draws on (prayer, pilgrimage, continuous communities in the land, the phrase "next year in Jerusalem") is far older. Its central political aim was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948; since then the word has generally meant support for Israel's continued existence as a Jewish and democratic state, compatible with a wide range of views about its borders, its government and its policies.

There have always been many Zionisms: political, cultural, labor, religious and revisionist strands that disagreed sharply with one another about economics, religion and the shape of the state. Critics, including Palestinian nationalists and parts of the anti-colonial left, describe it instead as a settler-colonial project; the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in 1975 equating Zionism with racism and revoked it in 1991.

That fight over the word is live on this site. Israel Unwired has argued that Soviet propaganda spent decades "portraying Zionism as racism and imperialism" and that the echo persists [3]. Jake Wallis Simons has spoken about "the theft of the term 'Zionism'" and has written about the history of the "Zionism is Racism" slogan ahead of a Green Party conference in Britain [8][9], a motion David Collier also published in full and criticized [5]. The Jewish Federations of North America reported joining more than 50 Jewish organizations in a declaration calling for anti-Zionism "to be recognized and confronted when it is used to marginalize, exclude, or discriminate against Jews" [10].