The other day, I received this comment.
Ironically, I had already been working on this post.
"ZIONISTS THINK..."
There is something that has become glaringly obvious to me over the past 22 months (and 77 years) of incredibly toxic Israel-Palestine discourse: Zionists and anti-Zionists are not arguing with each other, but at each other.
I see this argument from anti-Zionists a lot:
“Zionists think that they are entitled to colonize Palestine because their God promised it to them 3000 years ago.”
While, yes, it’s true that God promises the Land of Israel to the Jewish people in the Torah, I can’t think of a more out-of-touch understanding of Zionists and Zionism as a political movement.
A CLAIM ROOTED IN HISTORY
Forget about what the Torah says for a second. The history and ethnogenesis of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is historically and scientifically indisputable. It can be backed up with archeological findings, thousands of years’ worth of Jewish and non-Jewish secular historical record, cultural customs, linguistic research, and more. Though DNA is not what makes a Jew, genetic science, too, can trace the origins of the Jewish people as a distinct nation and ethnic group to the Land of Israel. None of this has anything to do with religion.
- history: the Jewish people became a distinct people in the Land of Israel (ethnogenesis), and most of the history in the Land of Israel is Jewish history.
- culture: Jewish culture is intrinsically tied to the Land of Israel, from the Hebrew calendar, which follows the agricultural cycle of the Levant, to the Hebrew language, the language indigenous to the land, which only Jews (and Samaritans, our closest ethnoreligious cousins) preserved.
A NATION AND A LAND
The concept of “religion” is not a Jewish one. In fact, the Hebrew word for religion is “dat” or “emuna,” meaning law or belief, respectively. Instead, Jews have always primarily identified as a “nation.” In Hebrew, we call ourselves the “Nation of Israel.” In this context, a nation is not a modern nation-state but a group of people whose collective identity includes shared language, history, ethnicity, territory, and/or culture.
Notably, the Jews of the Diaspora and the Jews who remained in the Land of Israel (whom anti-Zionists now erroneously call “Palestinian Jews”) maintained close cultural, familial, and commercial relationships throughout 2000 years of exile, because they saw each other as members of the same nation.
The concept among ancient nations (and the Jewish people are 3000-years-old and counting!) that their ancestral land is a gift from the heavens/deities/God is quite universal and can be found across many different cultures. But when you take Jewish identity out of its original and intended context, the belief in God’s promise to the People of Israel sounds a whole lot like religious supremacy or Manifest Destiny.
MISUNDERSTANDING THE TANAKH
The Jews and our earlier ancestors, the ancient Israelites, wrote the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) as a sort of national charter, delineating the genealogy, laws, beliefs, and ancient mythologies of the Nation of Israel. The Tanakh was written within a very specific cultural, historical, and social context. Its writers never intended for the Jewish national charter to become the foundation of the world’s two biggest religions, Christianity and Islam.
When the ancient Israelites wrote the Tanakh, they wrote about (how they understood) their own ancestors – our ancestors. Judaism, unlike Christianity and Islam, which are universalizing religions, is a closed, ethnic religion. Universalizing religions are religions that transcend ethnic, tribal, cultural, and national affiliation. They spread via colonialism, imperialism, and proselytization. Ethnic religions are religions that are specific to a particular ethnic group. Closed religious groups do not proselytize, though some, like Judaism, allow conversion.
When you say that Jews believe we have a right to the Land of Israel because our God said so, what you are doing is that you are viewing Jewish identity through a non-Jewish lens. You are misunderstanding Judaism as a universalizing religion, because that’s how you’ve been conditioned to understand religion in a world where Christianity (or Islam, in the Muslim world) is the default.
A HELPFUL FRAMEWORK
The Jewish people are one of the oldest ancient civilizations that is still around today. Instead of looking at the Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel through the lens of a world that sees universalizing religions as the default, I think it’s much more helpful to understand us by using other ancient civilizations we may be familiar with as a framework.
In ancient times, there was virtually no separation between a group’s national identity and their spiritual beliefs. Assyria, for example, was named after their national god, Ashur. Likewise, “Israel” means “One who wrestles with El [God],” “El” being one of the two most important deities in the Canaanite pantheon. El later merged with YHWH to become who we know today as the Hebrew God.
Think of ancient civilizations like the Ancient Egyptians or Ancient Greeks. They, too, had their spiritual framework and mythology, which is how they understood their origins and their ancestry. But when we think of the Ancient Egyptians or the Ancient Greeks, we don’t think of two religious groups, but rather, as ancient nations rooted in specific lands.
Other ancient nations also had ideas about the holiness of their lands. The Ancient Egyptians believed the Nile Valley was the center of the cosmos and a gift to them from the gods. Meanwhile, the Ancient Greeks believed Greece was the center of the world and that Mount Olympus was home to the gods.
THE EARLIEST POLITICAL ZIONISTS WERE SECULAR
You may not know this, but for thousands of years, Jews attempted, periodically, to regain autonomy in the Land of Israel. For a thorough breakdown, read my post Zionism Before Zionism. In the early-to-mid 19th century, numerous prominent rabbis purchased lands in Palestine for agricultural settlement and development. In 1873, 24 years before the First Zionist Congress, Rabbi Akiva Schlesinger even wrote a plan for the development of an independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel based on democratic — not religious — principles. What separated these earlier forms of “Zionism” with Zionism as the political movement that we know today is that the activities of the rabbis of the 19th century were spiritually-motivated, whereas the Zionists that came later were largely secular and predominantly socialist.
Theodor Herzl was an atheist. So was David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir once famously proclaimed, when asked about her faith, “I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God.”
SO WHY ARE MOST JEWS ZIONISTS?
In 1897, the Zionist movement itself defined Zionism in simple terms: “Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] secured under public law.” Today a Zionist is someone who supports the existence of the State of Israel. Zionism is a wide movement, with supporters across the entire political spectrum, with very different opinions on the Israeli government, the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the current war in Gaza, and more.
Because Judaism and Jewish nationhood are strongly intertwined, it’s true that, for many (but not all!) Zionists, the spiritual significance of the Land of Israel is an important factor in their Zionism. But the core “whys” of Zionism are the following:
(1) Zionists believe that Jews, like all other people that identify as a nation, have a legal right to self-determination under international law.
(2) Zionists believe that after over two millennia of relentless persecution, sovereignty is the key (or a key) to Jewish safety.
A MASSIVE PROJECTION
Ironically, it’s actually the movement for an Arab state in Palestine that began as a religious supremacist movement. The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a religious fundamentalist and an early member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Husseini had been a pan-Arabist until 1920, advocating for a unified Arab state in “Greater Syria,” which would include Palestine. But after falling out with other Arab nationalists, he switched his aspirations to that of a Palestinian Arab state.
To recruit other Arabs and Muslims to his cause, he began emphasizing the importance of Jerusalem — and the Al Aqsa Mosque, built atop the ruins of the Jewish temple — to Islam, disseminating the libel that the Zionists intended to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque, inciting his followers to murder Jews and chant things like “Palestine is ours! The Jews are our dogs!” This libel shows up time and time again to this day, so much so that Hamas named its October 7th attack “The Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Under Soviet influence in the 1960s, Palestinian nationalism secularized, though the religious undertones remained. In the 1980s, frustrated with a lack of progress with the Palestinian cause, the movement once again reverted to its fundamentalist religious origins with the founding of groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and Patreon.