Zionism was coined in the 1890s to name the organized political movement to create a Jewish state. After that goal was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, the label continued to be claimed by people who took pride in its existence and wanted it to survive and thrive. This included most American Jews, but not only them. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and declared, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”
It’s unlikely that those words will be heard again from an American president, of either party. To understand why, all you have to do is type the word Zionist into the search bar of any social-media platform, and review the rancid results.
The border between the internet and real life has become alarmingly porous. In May, Maureen Galindo, a candidate in the Democratic primary for a House seat in Texas, posted that if elected, she would turn an ICE detention center into “a prison for American Zionists,” where “most of them” would be castrated for being pedophiles. The notion that Zionism is a perversion or sickness is shared by extremists of many stripes. The far-left pundit Hasan Piker has called it “a mental illness,” and the far-right pundit Tucker Carlson has said that Christian supporters of Zionism are victims of a “brain virus.” The same ecumenism can be seen in the career of the term Zio: Originally popularized as an anti-Semitic slur by far-right white supremacists such as David Duke, it is now casually used by anti-Zionist Jews such as the actor Odessa A’Zion, whose now-problematic name compelled her to clarify on social media that she is “not a zio!”
The belief that Israel should continue to exist, which is what most people who call themselves Zionists mean by that word, does not seem to entail Nazism, insanity, or a taste for political conspiracy or sexual perversion. But the goal of this rhetoric, and the more genteel equivalents used in parts of academia and the culture industry, is not to provide an accurate definition; it is to make the word Zionist so toxic that people will be afraid to claim it.
What seems to have happened is that all the old antisemitic virulence that polite society has been careful to avoid since the Holocaust is now openly celebrated by the simple device of substituting ‘Zionist’, or ‘Zio’ for ‘Jew’. And off we go again.
But yes. this is a useful history of the Zionist movement.
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