Zionism & Anti Zionism 101

Zionism & Anti-Zionism 101 is a guide to understanding the language, politics, and power structures shaping discourse on Palestine and Israel. Centered on humanist Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives, it defines key terms, examines how misinformation operates, and challenges commonly accepted narratives about Israeli statehood, Jewish safety, and Palestinian liberation. Through historical context and direct responses to frequently asked questions, this resource offers readers a framework for engaging more thoughtfully with one of the most charged human rights atrocities of our time, and understanding why many Jews know, and are working to educate the majority, that true safety is collective, not state-imposed.

BASIC GLOSSARY 

*Note: The definitions of Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism are hotly contested and always have been within the Jewish community. This glossary is an attempt to articulate how mainstream pro-Palestinian movements define and use these terms. Pro-Israel institutions define these words differently, and in ways that depict pro-Palestinian individuals and institutions as anti-Jewish, violent, or in support of terrorism. Many pro-Israel organizations are actively working to enshrine their definitions in law and policy so they can persecute and prosecute those who disagree with them.

Zionism is an ideology and movement built around protecting and expanding Israel’s economic, militaristic, and political power in the world. It is premised on the belief that true Jewish safety can only be achieved through a Jewish State and that Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Zionists believe that Israel’s nationhood is the primary, if not sole, way to protect all Jews, and that the Jewish State must be defended at all costs. Many Jews are Zionists, but it is not an exclusively Jewish movement; in fact, some of the movement’s most influential leaders are Christian Zionists or non-religious, economically-motivated politicians. 

Anti-Zionism is an ideology and movement that rejects the notion that Jewish safety is dependent on Israel. Anti-Zionism works towards protecting Jews in Israel and across the diaspora–as well as Palestinians, Arabs, and marginalized groups everywhere–by building a culture and politic where all people are free and equitably resourced. Anti-Zionists believe that the State of Israel is a racist, colonial nation that fuels antisemitism globally and has violently oppressed Palestinians for over 75 years. It is a movement premised on the belief that Palestinians deserve liberty, dignity, land sovereignty, and reparative justice for almost a century of trauma. Many of the earliest critics of Zionism were Jewish, and many contemporary Jews are anti-Zionist. 

Antisemitism describes hateful language, stereotypes, prejudice, and physical violence that targets or dehumanizes Jews, Jewish houses of worship, or Jewish rituals. It describes a racial, religious, and/or ethnic bias against Jewish people simply because they are Jewish. Criticizing Israel, disagreeing with the politics of a Jewish institution, or being pro-Palestinian are NOT inherently antisemitic. 

Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic. It commonly refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their land in 1948. Violence against Palestinians was already occurring in the 1930s, but it escalated to what is frequently referred to as the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, when the British Mandate ended and Western-backed Israeli forces took over. During the Nakba, Palestinians were raped, killed, and terrorized en masse, and more than half of the entire population (over 750,000 humans) was permanently displaced.

Further Reading: Facing the Nakba Teaching Resource

Intifada is commonly used in the Arab world to describe uprising or rebellion. It also describes specific historical instances of Palestinians rising up against Israeli occupation, such as the First Intifada (following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982) and the Second Intifada (2000-2005). 

Further Reading: So what does ‘intifada’ actually mean?

ZIONIST PROPAGANDA / MISINFORMATION MACHINES

AIPAC: The American Israel Public Affairs Coalition. Dedicated to campaigning and fundraising for Zionist candidates and policy at every level of government. Targets and sabotages politicians who criticize Israel. Hugely responsible for the United States’ cultural, political, and economic entrenchment with Israel. 

Further Reading: This is How AIPAC Really Works

Anti-Defamation League (ADL): An organization that claims to protect Jews, but in practice primarily protects and reinforces Zionism. Regularly attacks, slanders, and disenfranchises individuals and institutions who criticize Israel or express support for Palestine. Works to bring Zionism into public schools via their No Place for Hate Pledge, which requires accepting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. (The IHRA definition says it’s antisemitic to describe the State of Israel as racist or to draw comparisons between Israeli policy and Nazi policy.)
Further Reading: Drop the ADL

Jewish Federation (JFed): One of many organizations that functions similarly or as a proxy for the ADL on a more local level. In Oregon, the Jewish Federation is very powerful and campaigns relentlessly against anyone who criticizes Israel, successfully getting teachers fired and organizations shut down for supporting Palestine. Recently, JFed called the Oregon Food Bank antisemitic for issuing a statement about the starvation of Palestinians. 

Project Esther: The Trump Administration’s multipronged plan to defame, defund, and dismantle pro-Palestinian groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. Project Esther was created by the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation that also created Project 2025. It is part of the larger conservative agenda to destroy progressivism in the U.S. Tactics include deporting pro-Palestinian activists, quashing dissent on college campuses, escalating public fear, and censoring those who speak out. It was borne from the Heritage Foundation’s “Task Force for Antisemitism,” which was primarily composed of Christian Nationalists.

Canary Mission: Began in 2014 as an anonymously-run blog that names and shames people who criticized Israel. Is now a fast-growing online doxxing platform that shares the personal information of pro-Palestinian advocates and takes credit for the detainment of some student activists. Multiple federal lawsuits against student activists have cited Canary Mission in official documents.

Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ): Organization recently founded by Adam Louis-Klein. Mission includes the official labeling of anti-Zionism as a hate movement by U.S. law enforcement. Accompanying aims include the labeling of anti-Zionist beliefs as “libels,” including “the colonizer libel,” “the apartheid libel,” “the genocide libel,” “the child killer libel” among many others.

The Jewish Majority: Organization led by Jonathan Schulman, an AIPAC alum whose job was to increase synagogues’ involvement in pro-Israel activism. Regularly attacks and labels pro-Palestinian individuals and groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace or Jews For Racial Justice. Recently released a letter of signatures opposing Zohran Mamdani for being “anti-Israel” even though he has regularly stated he supports Israel’s right to exist and is championed by many Jewish activists. 

Christian Zionists/Christian Nationalists: Some of the largest funders and promoters of Zionism today. They work closely with AIPAC, the ADL, and others to keep the United States financially, politically, and culturally invested in Israel. Again, this is not out of concern for Jews. Christian Zionists believe that a mass Jewish return to the Land of Israel will bring about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (at which point they believe all the Jews would be forced to convert or die off). 

FAQs

  • No. Israel’s policies, military practices, and propaganda actively contribute to antisemitism and violence all over the world. 

    Within Israel: Although Israel calls itself a Jewish State, it privileges the safety and rights of white, Ashkenazi, and religious Jews over everyone else, including Jews of color, Arab Jews, Palestinian Jews, secular Jews, and any Jews who protest the state’s policy or refuse to conscript. Black Jews and Arab Jews in particular are treated as second class citizens, frequently experiencing police brutality and ghettoization. Further Reading: Human Rights Watch Declaration of Apartheid by Israel 

    Globally: There is a pervasive narrative that “no Jew is safe while Israel is under threat.” This is an incredibly dangerous statement. If global leaders see Israel as the one true protector of the Jewish diaspora, they are incentivized to pour their resources into a foreign nation rather than the protection of their own Jewish citizens. Furthermore, Zionist propaganda mischaracterizes critique of Israel as antisemitism, which distracts from the harms of real antisemitism. It also misrepresents Jewish values and Jewish people, presenting Jews as a homogenous group aligned with Israel’s oppressive, greedy, exploitative practices.

    How can Israel claim to keep Jews safe while simultaneously (1) discriminating against non-white Jews, (2) censoring Jews who criticize the government, and (3) promoting a homogenized narrative of Judaism that so many Jews around the world reject? Conditional safety reserved only for white Jews who support Israel’s policy is, by definition, NOT SAFE FOR ALL JEWISH PEOPLE. 

  • No. Jews have been protesting Zionism and pointing out the flaws with the formation of Israel since these ideas began taking root in the 1800s. Judaism predates both Israel and Zionism by thousands of years. Our identities are not defined by, rooted in, or necessarily even associated with any government. To say that the criticism of a national government is equal to an attack on an entire ethnic group is as absurd as saying that to criticize the Trump Administration is an act of racism against white people. 

  • No. Zionism, as an ideology and political movement, precedes the Holocaust by over a century, and early Zionism looked very different from modern Zionism. Many early Jewish Zionists were interested in founding a secular Jewish State; they did not necessarily believe it needed to be on the land we now call Israel. (Back then all of Israel was called Palestine.) Many early Jewish Zionists became anti-Zionists later in life once they saw what their movement was becoming.

    The State of Israel was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust and gained public support by saying that it was for the protection of Jews. However, Israel only came into existence because of the political machinations of non-Jewish British politicians, whose motivations were borne largely from antisemitism and their desire to get Jews out of Europe. Arthur Balfour, known for his 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” was an antisemitic white supremacist who spoke in openly racist terms about Blacks, Arabs, and Jews. The Balfour Declaration preceded the Holocaust by over two decades and is still celebrated by the Israeli government today. 

  • Yes. International law defines the crime of genocide as “acts of genocide and the intent to destroy a group of people, or a part of that group.” Acts of genocide include killing or harming members of a group, inflicting conditions of life that will bring about its destruction, and more. 

    UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri said, “Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.” 

    Israeli leaders have frequently made explicit their intent to commit genocide against Palestinians and target civilians: 

    Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, said on October 9, 2023: “I have removed all restraints, [you’re allowed to] attack everything.” 

    Israeli Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, said, “We must destroy Rafah, Nuseirat, and Deir al-Balah. There is no half measure…absolute destruction.”

    After Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness,” 800 scholars of genocide and international law responded in a public statement: “Language used…appears to reproduce rhetoric and tropes associated with genocide and incitement to genocide.”

    In July of 2025 two prominent Israeli human rights organizations declared that Israel was committing a Genocide against Palestinans. And on September 15, 2025 the UN issued a formal declaration that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. Every leading human rights organization including the world's leading association of genocide scholars [have] declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

  • Zionists claim that this is a Hamas slogan that describes a desire to kill all Jews or Israelis to establish a Palestinian state. However, the phrase has existed since long before Hamas. In fact, the phrase is strongly associated with the right-wing Israeli Likud Party, which declared in 1977, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” Why is it okay when Israelis say this, but not Palestinians? 

    People who support Palestinian liberation and self-determination say “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” to mean exactly what the words mean: that all Palestinians living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea should be free from violence and oppression. Anti-Zionists feel that Palestinian freedom is not mutually exclusive with Jewish freedom, and actually makes our world safer for everyone. In fact, before Zionists began to sow discord and violence, many Jews lived happily and peacefully in Palestine alongside Arabs and Palestinians. 

    Further Reading: It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of “From the River to the Sea”

  • No, to both. Just as many Americans dislike and protest American policy, there are many Israelis protesting Netanyahu and the Zionist project overall. The former Israeli military lawyer Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi is one such example: she leaked a video of Israeli reserve soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian detainee in July 2024. She tried to go into hiding but has since been arrested and charged by the Israeli government for the leak.


    Many Israelis are married to Palestinians, are Palestinian-Israelis, or have Arab and Palestinian friends or family. Jews and Palestinians lived and worked side-by-side in Palestine before the foundation of Israel. Israelis are also inundated with state propaganda that is designed to keep them fearful and ignorant of Palestinians and the enormity of what is happening in Gaza. Criticizing systems, institutions, ideologies, and governments is not equivalent to criticizing or attacking individuals. 

  • The Two-State Solution has long been promoted by liberal Zionists. Many supporters of the Two-State Solution believe that such a deal would allow Palestinians and Jews to live together in peace. But scholars and activists on the Left are critical of the Two-State Solution for many reasons: 

    1. It fails to offer reparative justice. Israel took Palestinian land, displaced Palestinian people, and tortured those who remained for almost a century. Simply drawing a border and asking Palestinians to be content with a corner of the land that was stolen from them does nothing to amend such colossal trauma. In fact, it legitimizes Israel’s initial invasion and colonization, making it seem as if both sides happened upon the land at the same time, fought over it, experienced comparable losses, and then decided to share—-none of which is true. After everything Palestinians have endured, the Two-State Solution is as offensive and irrational as America’s “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws. Both are examples of an oppressor doling out a few meager privileges to the oppressed and calling it “freedom.”

    2. There is no reason to believe that Israel would respect the terms of a Two-State Solution even if an equitable version could be crafted. Israel has a long history of breaking treaties, promises, and ceasefires. The current “ceasefire” has allowed all Israeli hostages to be returned, and yet Palestinians continue to be murdered every day. Even though Israel has released 1700 Palestinian detainees who were imprisoned without charge or trial, at least 1000 remain in custody under nightmarish conditions. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the condition of human rights in Gaza, has described Israel’s approach to ceasefires as “You cease, I fire.” Since Israel continues to break its promises and remains exponentially more resourced than Palestine, how could a Two-State Solution be effective or enforced?

    3. There have been attempts throughout history to broker peace with deals that were essentially “Two-State Solutions” by different names–and they didn’t work. The United States made many deals with Indigenous North American tribes, only to consistently break their promises and oppress them further. Tribal reservations are similar in conceit to a Two-State Solution. But relegating a violated and traumatized people to undesirable corners of land has not healed or solved anything: Indigenous communities remain under-resourced and under-represented in American institutions, and plagued by high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and poverty. Similarly, when the United States abolished slavery and acknowledged former slaves as American citizens, that did not lead to equity, equal opportunity, or integration. 

    Oppressive governments and institutions rarely, if ever, dole out freedom or give up power without hidden agendas. The impulse to draw a line in the sand and “call it square” is premised on the false notion that Israel and Palestine were equally resourced, equally harmed, and will equally benefit from this solution. Critics of the Two-State Solution feel that it is illogical, unenforceable, and further legitimizes Zionist power while keeping Palestinians forever vulnerable to violence and foreign domination. 

  • Netanyahu is a fascistic and violent dictator committed to destroying the Palestinian people, but he is merely the current face of a Zionist system that has been paving the way for this moment for a century. Anti-Zionists feel that to center Netanyahu as the “core problem” is to ignore and normalize the ideologies, economics, and national politics backing him. Even without Netanyahu, Zionism remains inherently racist, violent, and oppressive. 

  • This is a Zionist talking point and a “gotcha” question that is frequently lobbed at anyone who suggests that Palestinians are humans with rights. The question is not particularly logical, since Israel does exist, and no one person could change that even if they wanted to–just as no one can change the fact that France or Canada or the U.S. exist unless their governments were to decide to dissolve. Zionists use the question to portray anti-Zionists as anti-Jewish. (Again, illogically assuming that Israel protects Jews.) The question sidesteps the real issue at hand:

    People have rights and nations have responsibilities to protect those people. If they fail to protect those people, it is our moral responsibility to critique those governments and mobilize for alternative systems of governance that provide real safety.

  • Anti-Zionists believe that Palestinian safety, liberation, and solidarity are the ONLY way we can build a world where ALL people, INCLUDING JEWS, are safe. History shows us over and over again that if we allow one demographic to be oppressed, then any demographic can later be targeted using the exact same playbook of oppression. When marginalized groups stand together for equality and peace, governments are forced to protect all of us, rather than pitting us against each other for their own economic or political gains. 

  • No. Anti-Zionists are very aware of antisemitism, frightened by Nazism, and alarmed by the violence compounding all over the world. These fears, and a belief in safety for all, are precisely why so many anti-Zionists fight for Palestinian liberation and call out fascism and bigotry whenever they can. Most anti-Zionists hold their political beliefs not in spite of their trauma or Jewishness or historical memories of the Holocaust but because of them. Jews frequently invoke the Holocaust by saying “never forget,” or “never again.” Anti-Zionist Jews feel that the best way to honor those words is by ensuring there is no Holocaust ever again FOR ANYONE.  

RESOURCES FOR NEWS, STATS, AND FURTHER READING