Nate Bear Substack
A motion passed by members of The Green Party in England and Wales declaring that Zionism is racism has generated a predictable outpouring of screeching hysteria and hyperbolic condemnation across the British political and media establishment.
But the worst thing about it is how Green Party leaders have folded. Four of their five MPs (who were elected in 2024 in large part because of their opposition to Israeli genocide and the belief this meant they were anti-Zionists) have opposed it, and the leader Zack Polanski didn’t even vote for it. Instead he has flopped around, saying that the “version of Zionism practiced by the Israeli government” is racist, while denying that Zionism is an inherently racist ideology.
This is a dishonest argument that lots of people have been making in the wake of the vote, including supposed allies of Palestine and opponents of the Gaza genocide. The Jewish desire for a homeland is not racist, they say, and should be separated from actually existing Zionism in the form of Israel, which is.
It’s disingenuous bollocks.
Firstly, believing in Zionism, which is the right of Jews to have a Jewish state, is not some “very pragmatic” belief that exists outside of a racial-supremacist ideology, as Alonso suggests. It is a racial-supremacist ideology. It is not a simple belief that Jews can move to a different place where they are safe, and integrate into that place while abiding by its customs, practices and ruling institutions. It is the belief in the establishment of a Jewish state with its own customs, practices and institutions. Most fundamentally though, it is the belief that Jews should be able to create a new ethnostate with new institutions where people ALREADY EXIST. And you obviously can’t do this without believing that the existing people are lesser than you and you therefore have the divine right to replace them, their cultures, practices and institutions.Racism is baked in to the very logic of the thing! You can’t displace and ethnically cleanse an already existing people in a non-racist way! This would be the case whether a Jewish state was created in Palestine or Outer Mongolia. You can’t, as Owen Jones seems to think you can, have a Zionism that isn’t at the expense of another people. Unless you’re going to establish the Jewish state on the moon, Zionism by definition and necessity requires ethnic cleansing. It is therefore patently racist. Green leaders should be making these points and demanding opponents explain how ethnic cleansing isn’t racism, rather than pathetically acquiescing to fabricated outrage designed to protect a genocidal settler-colonial project.
Jones also applies a “self-determination” theory to Zionism, tying it more closely to general struggles for independence undertaken by other ethnic or religious groups. Other Zionists in the last few days have used that exact word to defend and excuse Zionism and Israel, as did the Green MP Adrian Ramsey, who said he opposed the motion because it ran counter to his belief in Jewish self-determination.
Whether consciously or ignorantly, “self-determination” in the context of a Jewish state is being entirely misused. The concept of self-determination historically has been applied to minority groups which existunder violent and oppressive majoritarian rule, and who insist on their independence from such rule. It is grounded in and delineated by clear moral imperatives concerning the suffering of the oppressed under their oppressors. Jews have never existed under oppressive majoritarian Palestinian rule! They existed under, at various times, oppressive and discriminatory rule thousands of miles away in western and eastern Europe. And obviously it was Europeans who committed mass murder against Jews, not Palestinians. There is no right to “self-determination” in the land of another and against people who have done you no harm. It’s not just illogical, it’s an obscene notion that would justify any oppressed group moving anywhere in the world and ethnically cleansing whoever they wanted, justified on the basis that somewhere, at sometime, they had been discriminated against. Self-determination on someone else’s land is a moral perversion of a foundationally just and worthy idea.
The people to whom the idea of self-determination most obviously and logically applies are the Palestinians. They are being discriminated against, abused, and mass murdered on the basis of their ethnicity on their own lands by the unjust majoritarian rule of a different ethnic group. They did have their land stolen and their institutions, from the Arab High Committee to the Supreme Muslim Council to municipal councils, destroyed and replaced by the institutions of the colonial invaders. These colonial invaders have genocided them.
It’s hard to know whether the debate around Zionism is undertaken as a wilful deception or is reproduced as a result of learned ignorance. A lot of it certainly is opportunistic. Which is to say people who do know about the supremacist (racist) origins of Zionism pretend it is some noble project of self-determination because they are Zionists seeking to uphold the status quo. And people who don’t know about the supremacist (racist) origins of Zionism don’t want to know, because they don’t want to shatter their supremacist Judeo-centric worldview. Either way, whether through wilful or learned ignorance, there are strong motivations to uphold fictions around what Zionism actually is and stands for.
A further significant wrinkle is that many people do fairly innocently believe, as a result of cultural and educational brainwashing, that Zionism sprung fully-formed out of the holocaust. That Jews, seeking safety after the second world war, demanded a state, and the UN dutifully granted them one in 1948. Very few know that Zionism emerged as an ethno-nationalist ideology almost one hundred years before that, and was conceived as an explicitly settler-colonial ideology.
Early Zionism
One of the earliest Jewish nationalist thinkers Moses Hess published ‘Rome and Jerusalem’ in 1862 in which he argued for Jewish settlement in Palestine. In 1896 Zionist organiser and theorist Theodor Herzl wrote ‘The Jewish State’ in which an entire section was titled ‘The Occupation Of The Land.’ Herzl declared that “the Jews will get Palestine” while forecasting that “Jewish infiltration is bound to end badly” because of Palestinian resistance. Another prominent 19th century Jewish Zionist, Ben-Yehuda, wrote that “there are now only five hundred thousand Arabs, who are not very strong, and from whom we shall easily take away the country.” Early 20th century Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky is often labelled one of the fathers of Zionism. He repeatedly called Jewish settlement in Palestine “colonisation,” while Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion in 1937 described Palestine as “containing vast colonization potential which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified to exploit.” He said Jews would settle Palestine “through agreement and understand with the Arabs, or via other means.” The other means he referred to was the violent ethnic cleansing he ended up directing himself. Zionism emerged long before 1945 and was explicitly described by Zionist Jews as a settler project of colonisation. It takes almost no effort to know these facts, so one must conclude they are simply ignored, by supposed allies and enemies of Palestine alike, out of expediency to Zionist interests and sensibilities.
And now, 150 years after Zionism emerged as an explicitly settler ideology, the Jewish state has committed a genocide and we’re supposed to believe that genocide can somehow emerge materially from a non-racist state. Another absurdity. Only racism produces genocide. Only racism produces an apartheid society that desires to ethnically cleanse two million people. The ruins of Gaza are the perfect visual description for what Zionism as an ideology has always been.
Because everything is now clearer than ever, what we’re beginning to see is an effort to rehabilitate Zionism. We’re beginning to see an effort to separate Israel from its underlying ideology in order to fold it quietly back into polite imperial society. Liberals detest that Palestinian rights, genocide, apartheid and Zionism have become election issues. Hence this outrage over the Green motion which will be used to try and destroy the party much like Corbyn and his movement was destroyed over fake antisemitism hysteria. Hence Mamdani and his betrayals, and the angry reactions, even among so-called leftists, to people calling out this rehabilitation. I was on the end of this the other day when Hasan Piker, a multimillionaire social media personality with the intellectual capacity of a sea sponge, attacked me and sided with an Israeli Zionist over my criticism of Mamdani. On his live stream, Piker, who just a few months ago was a vicious critic of Zionists, said that he’s happy to have fans in the IDF. Piker has more than 5 million cultists across his social media platforms, and now they’re hearing that soldiers who’ve committed genocide can not just be rehabilitated but can be included in a leftist movement.
Piker is advancing principle-less and failed liberal big-tentism.
He is advancing the failed social democratic liberalism that produced a genocide in the first place.
He is advancing genocidal liberalism.
Intellectually both Piker and Green leaders are demonstrating what the open mind as an open wound looks like in practice. The confused bleeding out of contradictory positions in the vain hunt for legitimacy in a liberal democratic system.
Once again we are seeing why genuine progress and justice is impossible within the confines of liberal democracy.
That’s not to say the Green motion was a bad thing. Far from it. It helps sharpen the contradictions, shows up the performative frauds and creates useful or even destructive tension that opens up new avenues for change.
But as a system for material change, liberal democracy, if it doesn’t crush the best of intentions and the most principled of voices, subsumes and redirects them towards its own ends.
Most of the time, however, as a system designed to sustain capitalist-imperialism, it simply elevates Zionists, capitalists and neo or actual fascists.
Which is why only revolutionary futures will allow an obvious truth to be proudly declared by all: Zionism is racism.
And only in revolutionary futures will Palestine be free.