Naomi Braine has been a non-zionist Jew and activist for most of her life, involved in movements for bodily autonomy, feminist queer liberation, AIDS-related harm reduction, and Palestine Solidarity. Her day job is as a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, City University of NY.

With Trump in the White House and Israeli aggression continuing across the region despite the Gaza ceasefire, Zionism may appear to be ascendent. In spite of this, the Israeli historian and political scientist, Ilan Pappe, has said the end of Zionism may be in sight. Zionism defines Israel as the nation of all Jews everywhere more than as the state of its citizens (some of whom are Palestinian), which challenges us to think about how the decline of Zionism may unfold in the population centers of the diaspora. Asking this question provides a potentially useful perspective on contemporary dynamics within Jewish communities outside of Israel, especially in the United States.

There is an increasingly visible and vocal non-Zionist Jewish diaspora that confronts escalating institutional strategies to define Zionism as essential to Jewish identity, with the corollary that anti-Zionism is by definition a form of anti-Semitism. This struggle has produced disorienting situations such as the destruction of (Palestine solidarity) Sukkahs on several college campuses in October, 2024, and NYU’s declaration that three Jewish faculty members are “Persona Non Grata” – all in the name of protecting Jewish students. In a similar vein, right wing organization Stand With Us issued a report about Jewish Voice for Peace that accuses the organization of promoting antisemitism and partnering with terrorists. There has been considerable analysis of the weaponization of definitions of (and accusations of) anti-Semitism, but somewhat less attention to the systematic erasure of Jewish activists as Jews, especially in educational contexts, and what work this accomplishes in the current moment. Throughout the United States, Jewish institutions are functionally sitting shiva on some of their young adult offspring, expelling those who insist that Jewish identity and peoplehood exist independently of nationalist loyalty to a Jewish state.

The equation of Jewish identity with Zionism renders anti-Zionist Jews existentially impossible, despite the relatively recent invention of Zionism within the historical panorama of Jewish life. There are many layers of irony in this, as the Judaism practiced for the last 2000 years is intrinsically diasporic, having been deliberately developed in the face of dispersion and the destruction of Temple-based worship. A desire to return to Jerusalem lies at the heart of Judaism, and the emotional weight of that desire has enabled Zionism in the past and present, but a spiritual yearning is not the same as a nation-state. Early Zionism was predominantly secular, emerging in the context of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and offered a form of assimilation for Ashkenazi Jews within dominant European nationalist frameworks for identity, in contrast to the statelessness of a diasporic identity with deep historical and cultural roots as Europe’s internal ‘other.’

Early Zionists described their migration to Palestine as colonization, following larger European narratives of possession, occupation, and salvation. This can be seen perhaps most clearly in the writing of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose version of Zionism may be closest to the dominant perspective in Israel today, in which he speaks bluntly of colonizers and natives with Jews clearly located as the former and Palestinians as the latter. The classic phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land” survived long after the majority of the overt colonial language was erased. This discourse echoes that of early settlers across the Americas, many of whom also fled persecution or were exiled; few people will leave everything they know behind when life is going well. The contemporary refusal to recognize a colonial history enables a parallel refusal to see the ways Israel’s history and current actions fit historical patterns of settler displacement and eventual genocide of indigenous populations across settler-colonial societies. From this perspective, Israel’s actions are far from unprecedented, but earlier colonies did not engage in these processes in a global spotlight, live-streamed through social media, and in the context of well-developed and widely circulated critical analyses of colonization from the perspective of the colonized.

While Zionism began decades before Nazism, the Holocaust has become central to Zionist-Jewish education and identity, creating a narrow understanding of Jewish histories and worldviews. Naomi Klein talks about Holocaust education as a form of traumatization through intentionally inflicting the trauma of the Nazi genocide onto successive generations of Jews for whom it is not personal memory, in particular through the development of “immersive” education based on the arousal of deep emotional experience and identification. This educational strategy has now been extended to the events of Oct 7, 2023, to make the Hamas attacks “real” for those who did not experience them. The fundamental worldview underlying this approach to Jewish education locates anti-Semitism as an eternal secular threat, a permanent aspect of western civilizations that always carries the potential to erupt into genocide. The Holocaust education narrative has a ‘happy ending’ in the founding of the state of Israel, which Klein argues actually forecloses working through the historical reality of the Nazi genocide by keeping it alive while cementing Zionism/Israel as salvation in the face of the ever-present possibility of another genocide.

Secular anti/non-Zionism, especially in the diasporist form expressed by most Jews involved in Palestine Solidarity organizing, is a direct threat to the worldview and construction of history that underlies the Holocaust education that Klein describes. The Palestine Solidarity movement embodies the ability of Jews in the diaspora to reject the model of the world many of them have been taught and move towards one centered in a very different understanding of history; specifically, one that centers an historicized understanding of the shoah and relocates Israel from a project of salvation to a colonial state that reflects its European origins. The power of this cultural and political movement among Jews, especially young adults in the centers of the diaspora, and its intrinsic threat to a Zionist/nationalist identity and ideology has forced a shift from discounting non-Zionist identity to actively erasing it as a way to be Jewish in the world.

The idea of the Non-Jew or the Un-Jew is not new, but the contemporary strategy of erasing, not merely marginalizing, Jewish alternatives to Zionism is particular to the current moment and accomplishes, or aspires to accomplish, multiple things. First and foremost, the erasure of non/anti-Zionist Jews creates the appearance of universal agreement around the centrality the state of Israel as a core element of Jewish identity. Once Jews are located as Zionist by definition, the argument that anti-Zionism is intrinsically a form of anti-Semitism becomes significantly stronger, as anti-Zionism appears to be an attack on a universal element of Jewish identity. This reasoning underlies the core strategies used to suppress Palestine solidarity organizing in educational contexts, as well as the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism that has been adopted by some government and educational institutions in the US.

In addition, this enclosure of Jewish identity as definitionally Zionist limits the ability of Jewish solidarity activists to counteract accusations of anti-Semitism against the movement, and simultaneously amplifies tensions around visibility that are intrinsic to solidarity work. Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestinians believe that Jewish liberation and safety require Palestinian liberation, although with some variation in the details. Yet an intrinsic element of that solidarity, of the fundamental connections between Jewish and Palestinian liberation, includes the understanding that Palestinian experience must be at the center, especially now as Israel escalates its genocidal assaults on Palestinian life. Jews may not hold significant power globally, but we do, by definition, in the Jewish state of Israel, and for that reason we must step back and follow the lead of those who have been forced to the margins by the power of the Jewish-Israeli state. We bring our Jewish traditions and cultures to spaces of struggle in order to show up as ourselves and as part of the shared project of liberation, but we limit the ways we draw attention to the presence of Jews as Jews. This necessary element of solidarity has the consequence of facilitating the erasure of Jewish engagement with and commitment to the struggle, especially in college campuses and other coalitional spaces (in contrast to explicitly Jewish-centric actions).

Finally, it is important to understand how disinformation can function in society; the relentless assertion of a particular claim or perspective can come to define what is treated as known or recognizable. The Republican Party has elevated this to an artform at least since 2016, and its power can be seen in the algorithms of social media platforms as well as the relentless growth of Fox News and far right talk radio. The unrelenting insistence that Zionism lies at the core of Jewish identity has gained a similar dominance within institutions and official discourses, and has growing power within cultural discourses as well. US politicians and corporations may not be invested in Jewish self-determination, but they are deeply invested in Israel’s power in the Middle East. The Holocaust narrative linked to the equation of Zionism with Jewish identity offers a culturally and ideologically potent counter-force to the relentless visibility of a genocide unfolding in real-time on social media.

The breadth and depth of Jewish opposition to the genocide in Gaza demonstrates the ultimate weakness of institutional efforts to collapse Jewishness and Zionism. The growing insistence on creating Jewish communities that do not center Zionism and that refuse to live in isolationist fear will ultimately prove more powerful than self-enclosed identity and community built on the conviction that militarized nationalism offers the only form of safety. A cultural education that teaches children to fear and distrust other members of society through lessons that anti-Semitism lurks everywhere and may arise unpredictably is already failing with many young adults in the diaspora, who have learned the lessons of Jewish history but draw conclusions based on solidarity. A more expansive Jewish identity that is not defined by the interests of the state of Israel has re-emerged, at least in the diaspora, and grows more visible in the resistance to and refusal of genocide. The depth of the institutional power aligned with Zionism also grows more visible as it exacts greater penalties on those who dissent, but these threats have little power for many Jews who have internalized the calls for justice at the heart of many Jewish teachings. A new diaspora grows every day, and is (re)building powerful alternatives to a Jewishness dependent on ethnocentrism and fear.