Zionism is racism. A recent debate in the Green Party of England and Wales has brought this question to the fore, with members voting to formally adopt an anti-Zionist position.
The motion has provoked predictable hysteria across the British political and media establishment, as well as discomfort within elements of the Green Party leadership.
While Zack Polanski and his Green colleagues have consistently taken a far stronger position on Israel’s genocide in Gaza than the UK Government and other mainstream political parties, adopting an anti-Zionist position is only a starting point. For socialists the question is not simply whether Zionism is racist, but why it is racist and what material interests that racism serves both in Israel and across the globe. On these questions, the debate within the Green Party has failed to offer a sufficient analysis.
To understand why Zionism is racist, we must examine not only the ideology itself, but the historical conditions in which it emerged. For an analysis of Zionism to be of any practical use, it must be situated within the broader context of capitalism and imperialism.
Liberal Zionists, although they may reject the label, attempt to separate Zionism from its history. They present Israel as a fundamentally benign project which has simply been led astray by right wing actors such as Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party. This rewriting of history withstands no scrutiny.
From its emergence as a political movement, Zionism sought to found a Jewish state in Palestine despite the existence of an established Palestinian population. Its leading figures understood the project in colonial terms. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, described the proposed Jewish state as “an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.” Herzl also sought the support of Cecil Rhodes, one of the British Empire’s most notorious colonialists. It’s this that makes clear that the Zionist movement was self-aware as to its colonial character and the material problem it faced: Palestine was already inhabited.
The establishment of this new state therefore required the acquisition of land, the displacement of Palestinians, and the creation of a Jewish demographic majority. It’s at this point that racist ideas about entitlement and supremacy truly begin to develop in order to facilitate and legitimise the process of dispossession.
The result was not simply the peaceful arrival of Jewish people in Palestine. Zionist militias carried out attacks and expulsions between 1947 and 1949, known as The Nakba. More than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. Since the establishment of Israel, mass killings, destruction, forced displacement, starvation, torture, kidnappings, and the systematic disposession of Palestinians has continued, alongside an ever escalating agenda of ethnic cleansing. This goes side by side with a system of apartheid, with many human rights organisations citing systematic discrimination, dispossession, segregation, and the denial of equal rights across the social, economic, and democratic spectrum.
This is why Zionism cannot simply be reduced to Netanyahu, Likud, or the Israeli right, nor understood solely through racial prejudice or hostility. It must be understood in relation to the political and material foundations of the Israeli state and the geopolitical interests of those who protect it.
To present racism as the fundamental cause of colonial violence is to treat it as something that simply exists, rather than asking how it is produced and maintained to serve settler-colonialism. In the case of Zionism, racist conceptions of national belonging and entitlement help establish and defend a political order built on Jewish national supremacy, while legitimising the dispossession and oppression this order requires. A socialist analysis must therefore examine how racism serves these material interests, rather than treating it as an isolated moral failing.
However, this analysis remains incomplete without understanding the geopolitical interests that sustain the Israeli state. Zionism and its racism could not be practiced without Israel’s perverted relationship with Western imperialist powers, particularly the United States, but also the EU and Britain. Western imperialist interest in Israel does not stem from a belief in Zionism; rather, Zionism legitimises this relationship, just as racism legitimises the actions of Israel.
Simply put, Israel serves as both an economic and military outpost of Western strategic influence in the Middle East. The driving force is imperialism and the West’s attempt to maintain existing international power structures. Challenging Israel, Zionism, and its racism therefore requires understanding and challenging global imperialism too.
Zionism is racism because the establishment and maintenance of a state founded on Jewish national supremacy has depended, and for as long as it exists will continue to depend, on the dispossession and subjugation of Palestinians. However, such a statement serves little purpose without a proper analysis.
Socialists and anti-imperialists around the globe should have no difficulty proclaiming that Zionism is racism, that Palestinian resistance under occupation is legitimate, and that Palestine must be free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But these positions must be advanced with the aim of developing a meaningful analysis that contributes to the struggle against global imperialism and Israeli apartheid.
