When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. The US president says socialism only pretends to be democratic “because it sounds so nice”; that “it’s really communism you’re talking about” and that people such as Mamdani pose “the biggest threat to our nation … since its founding”.
People who despise an idea, seeing it as the manifestation of everything wicked, cannot be expected to define it accurately. As with the radical right and socialism, so it is with the left and Zionism. There are interwoven historical, biblical and intellectual strands to the belief that Jews have an ancestral homeland on the eastern border of the Mediterranean.
It is a belief that has evolved across centuries. It was expressed as liturgical yearning before being crystallised in the modern era as a political ambition to be safe from persecution, given urgency by mass slaughter before achieving realisation in 1948 with the foundation of the state now called Israel. Since then it has been refracted through different lenses of war and contemporary Israeli politics.
That process defies capture by a single word. Zionism can be left and right; moderate and extreme. Unless you want to join the Green party of England and Wales, in which case, there is only one permitted definition.
Last weekend, the party voted for a motion that declares Zionism “fundamentally incompatible with anti-racist principles, equality and justice” because it is based on “European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression”. The Greens are now an “anti-Zionist” party to their constitutional core. Any objection on the basis that such a policy vilifies Jews who recognise other definitions of Zionism is dealt with in a pre-emptive clause.
The only target is Zionism “as defined” in the motion and not the “religious or ethnic background of those who may identify as Zionists”. By this Orwellian formula, Jews who call themselves Zionists are still tolerable to the Greens, but only if their personal understanding of Zionism is something the party considers to be the wrong one. If they want to be loyal members, they should adopt the doctrinally correct definition.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
