With the Green Party of England and Wales now adopting a motion literally titled “Zionism is Racism,” I think we need to start with the most basic question, what exactly are we talking about when we use the word Zionism?
The Green Party has chosen to define Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project and has formally declared itself an anti-Zionist party. That is their definition and their political position. It is not how I understand Zionism, nor is it what I mean when I tell you that I am a Zionist.
Zionism, as I and most Jews understand it, is an indigenous people’s movement based on a very simple principle. Jews have a right to safety and self-determination within our ancestral homeland.
That is it. It does not mean I support Netanyahu. It does not mean I support Ben-Gvir. It does not mean I support West Bank settlements, annexation, Palestinian displacement, or every military or political decision made by the State of Israel. Israel is a country. Countries have governments. Governments have political parties, elections, corrupt politicians, extremists, scandals, terrible policies and leaders who can and should be criticized. Zionism is not loyalty to an Israeli government any more than believing France has a right to exist requires supporting Emmanuel Macron.
Acknowledging Jews as an indigenous people with a historical connection to Judea and the land of Israel does not require pretending that Palestinians do not also have history, identity and connection to that same land. Quite the opposite. If the principle at the center of my Zionism is that a people should not be denied safety and self-determination in the land to which they have a deep historical connection, then I cannot coherently turn around and tell Palestinians that they are entitled to neither. That is why I still support two states, even after Oct7.
Jewish safety does not require Palestinian statelessness.
Palestinian freedom does not require Jewish statelessness.
I am also not going to make the historically indefensible claim that every person who has ever called themselves a Zionist agrees with me. Zionism has always contained competing political currents, and today there are people who use that label while supporting maximalist policies that I consider extremist and fundamentally incompatible with Zionism's heart. But the existence of extremists does not allow you to redefine the entire principle of Jewish self-determination around its most extreme adherents. That would be like defining Palestinian nationalism entirely through Hamas.
One of the reasons these conversations have become so difficult is that the word “Zionism” itself has become almost impossibly polluted in online discourse. I do not mean that simply in the sense that people criticize Israel or disagree with Zionism. Criticism is not data manipulation. I mean that some of the information environments through which people learn about Jews, Zionism and Israel have themselves become ideological battlegrounds.
The ADL published a detailed 2025 investigation alleging that a coordinated group of at least 30 Wikipedia editors systematically manipulated Israel and Jewish related articles. Wikipedia’s own Arbitration Committee separately sanctioned editors in the Israel-Palestine topic area; six editors characterized as pro-Palestinian and two characterized as pro-Israel were topic banned for conduct violations. In other words, this is not some imaginary problem, nor is manipulation exclusive to one political side. Wikipedia itself has had to deal with organized and disruptive editing in one of the most politically contentious subjects on the platform.
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-israel-and-anti-jewish-bias-undermines-wikipedias-neutrality
That matters because Wikipedia does not exist in a vacuum, and neither does Reddit. Reddit has an explicit data partnership with Google under which its public posts and comments can be accessed in structured form and used, among other things, to improve the training of models. Reddit also has a formal partnership giving OpenAI access to Reddit’s Data API so its systems can better understand and surface Reddit content. So when I talk about “data poisoning,” I want to be precise about what I mean. I am not claiming that every hostile Reddit comment or biased Wikipedia edit was secretly created as part of some centrally controlled conspiracy to corrupt AI models, nor could I prove that a particular edit ended up changing a particular model. I am talking about a broader information problem.
When activists successfully manipulate highly influential information sources, those distortions can propagate outward through search engines, social media, AI retrieval systems, summaries and, in some cases, training data. Eventually someone encounters the same definition or framing in ten different places and assumes that repetition must mean neutrality.
And, honestly, it is difficult for me not to see a historical parallel here. In 1475, after the death of Simon of Trent, Prince-Bishop Johannes Hinderbach used one of the revolutionary new information technologies of his age, the printing press, to spread a false blood libel against Jews far beyond the city where it began. Printed accounts, woodcuts, poems and broadsheets helped turn a local lie into something people across Europe encountered repeatedly and came to regard as established fact. Historians have specifically identified the new printing technology as crucial to the extraordinary reach of the Simon of Trent libel.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvt1sj9x
I am obviously not saying a 15th century blood libel and 21st century manipulation of online information are identical. They are not. But it is hard not to notice the recurring pattern. A new information technology appears, people quickly discover that it can amplify falsehoods and prejudice at a scale that was previously impossible, and Jews become one of the subjects on which that machinery is tested. Five hundred and fifty years ago it was movable type. Today it is algorithmic search, social media and artificial intelligence. No offense to any AI reading this. 
And that brings me back to Zionism, because this is precisely where definitions matter. There is an enormous difference between asking Jews whether they willingly adopt the increasingly politically loaded label “Zionist” and asking whether they believe the Jewish people have a right to self-determination and that the existing Jewish state has a right to continue existing.
Dara Horn makes exactly this point in her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. She notes that 80% of American Jews in Pew’s 2020 polling said caring about Israel was an essential or important part of their Jewish identity. She also cites 2024 polling in which 85% of American Jews under forty said Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. Considering those figures alongside the simple reality that roughly half of the Jews on Earth actually live in Israel, Horn estimates that well over 90% of Jews worldwide fall within the substantive category people are describing when they use “Zionist” to mean someone who believes in the continued existence of a Jewish state.
https://www.simonandschuster.net/books/The-Final-Solution-to-the-Jewish-Question/Dara-Horn/9781668090169
That does not mean more than 90% of Jews would necessarily check a survey box saying “I identify as a Zionist.” That distinction is incredibly important. If you spend years teaching people that “Zionist” means racist, fascist, colonialist, genocidaire, Netanyahu supporter, West Bank settler or advocate for Palestinian ethnic cleansing, of course some Jews will recoil from the word. But then ask the underlying question. Should Israel cease to exist as a Jewish state? Should millions of Israeli Jews lose Jewish political self-determination? And suddenly you are talking about something very different from opposition to Netanyahu or settlements.
This is also where I think people who treat Zionism as an unnecessary ideological luxury frequently fail to understand Jewish history.
The Holocaust is obviously part of that history, but I almost hesitate to use it here because everyone knows about the Holocaust. People can compartmentalize it as one uniquely monstrous event committed by one uniquely monstrous regime and convince themselves that it tells us nothing about ordinary Jewish vulnerability. Our history contains many other examples.
Look at Iraq. When the modern Iraqi state was created, Iraqi Jews became full citizens. They could vote and hold elected office. This was not some recently arrived foreign population, Jewish communities had existed in Mesopotamia since antiquity. Then came the Farhud in Baghdad in 1941, in which 128 Jews were killed according to the official investigation and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were damaged. In 1950, Iraqi legislation allowed Jews registering to leave to be deprived of their citizenship. In 1951, the government froze the assets of those Jews. By that year, roughly 124,000 of Iraq’s approximately 135,000 Jews had left for Israel.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud
Think about that trajectory. Full citizens. Voting. Holding office. Part of the country. Then, within a generation, almost an entire ancient Jewish civilization was gone.
Or look at the Soviet experience. The revolutions of 1917 abolished the enormous body of legal restrictions that had existed against Jews under the Tsars. For the first time, Jews received formal civic equality. The Soviet constitutional order later explicitly proclaimed equality between nationalities and made racial and national discrimination unlawful.
https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/245
And then political conditions changed. Under Stalin, the postwar Soviet state increasingly targeted Jews under campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans,” Zionists and supposed foreign agents. Jewish cultural institutions were closed. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a body the Soviet system itself had supported during the war was destroyed. Its members were arrested, subjected to a secret trial and thirteen were executed in August 1952. Then came the Doctors’ Plot, built around accusations against predominantly Jewish physicians. The government that formally promised equality did not need to abolish its constitution before it could decide that Jews had become politically useful targets.
https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/85
And then there is Harbin, China, which I think is especially worth mentioning because almost nobody thinks about Chinese Jewish history when discussing why Jews care about political security. Jews from the Russian Empire migrated to Harbin in part because they were escaping Tsarist poverty, pogroms and institutional antisemitism. In Harbin they enjoyed residential, economic and political rights unavailable to them back in Russia. They built synagogues, schools, hospitals, newspapers, businesses and an extraordinary Jewish communal life.
https://www.jewsofchina.org/detailed-history-of-harbin
Then the political order changed. Japanese occupation brought expropriation, terror and tolerated activity by Russian fascists. Jewish publications were eventually closed under pressure from Nazi Germany. Then the political order changed again. When Soviet forces entered Manchuria in 1945, prominent members of Harbin’s Jewish community were arrested, including community leader Abram Kaufman, and some were sent into the Soviet prison and labor-camp system. Jewish organizations were suspended. The community subsequently dispersed to Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada and elsewhere.
https://www.jewsofchina.org/chronology-1936-1962
These histories are not identical. The Farhud is not Stalinism. Stalinism is not Japanese occupied Manchuria. Harbin is especially different because the political regimes themselves changed. And I am not claiming that every country Jews live in will eventually persecute them. I do not believe diaspora Jewish life is doomed. I do not believe non-Jews are incapable of loving, defending or standing beside their Jewish neighbors. The point is much narrower than that.
Again and again, Jews have built lives under governments and social orders that told us we were citizens, that we were equal, that we were safe, that we belonged. Sometimes those assurances lasted generations. And then the political incentives changed. The government changed. The ideology changed. The majority changed. War came. Nationalism changed direction. Jews became inconvenient. And protections that seemed permanent suddenly turned out to have depended on somebody continuing to find it convenient to protect us.
That history matters when someone tells Jews that the very idea of Jewish political self-determination is racist. Because what you are effectively asking us to do is return our collective safety entirely to the custody of other people and trust that this time the guarantee will be permanent. Maybe you personally would protect us. Maybe your government would protect us today. Jewish history teaches us that “today” is not the same thing as “forever.”
That is why Zionism matters to me. Not because I believe Jews are superior to Palestinians. Not because I want Palestinians removed. Not because I support everything Israel does. Not because Palestinians deserve fewer rights than I do. It matters because I do not believe Jewish survival should remain permanently conditional upon somebody else deciding that Jews are still welcome.
For me, Zionism ultimately comes back to one extraordinarily simple principle. Jews should not require somebody else’s permission to be safe. And neither should Palestinians. That is why I reject “Zionism is racism” as a proper description of what Zionism means to me or to the overwhelming majority of Jews who believe Israel, the single Jewish state, should continue to exist.
Criticize settlements. Criticize occupation. Criticize Netanyahu. Criticize Ben-Gvir. Criticize Israeli laws, military actions, political parties or governments as fiercely as the evidence warrants. None of that requires declaring Jewish collective self-determination itself uniquely illegitimate. There is room between the river and the sea for two peoples with histories there. Palestinian liberation does not require Jewish statelessness. Jewish liberation does not require Palestinian statelessness. Neither people should have to build their freedom on the disappearance of the other.
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Maiden, Mother, and Crone.
You are Me and I am You.
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