There has been debate within the Jewish community—and outside it—for decades concerning anti-Zionism. Specifically: is anti-Zionism antisemitism? Disagreement with this proposition has come primarily from the Left. This tracks with an increasingly evident trend of Zionism being coded in Right vs. Left terms, with those in favor on the Right and those against on the Left. Events since October 7 have confirmed this pattern, with the consolidation of an anti-Zionist discourse on the global Left that has elevated Palestine as a central concern of and metaphor for global justice. But said events have also disrupted it, with the increase of an anti-Zionist discourse on parts of American Right as well its continuation among Neo-Nazis globally. In either case, framing one’s politics as anti-Zionism, understood as opposition to the State of Israel, relies on the absence of a name for the project that will replace it. Anti-Zionists are against Israel, but what are exactly are they for, and where would such a project fall on the political map? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish politics—the terms “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism” specifically, and now increasingly what is generally referred to as “Diasporism”—suffer more from definitional vagueness and contrary classifications along the Left-Right spectrum than most other political movements. Much of this vagueness is both unnecessary and politically motivated; on the other hand, the contradictions can be resolved if the movements in question are defined empirically, named accordingly, and then classified comparatively. Such a revision would help restore the transparency required to understand current alliances, and to resolve this (and other) conflicts within a universally applicable and just paradigm.
In the interest of definitional clarity, the term “Zionism,” should be replaced in contemporary discourse with the term “Jewish nationalism” or “Jewish national self-determination.” A neologism coined by Nathan Birnbaum, Zionism was intended to connect Jewish national self-determination with a return to Zion, the traditional name for Jerusalem. The rebuilding of Jerusalem, along with ingathering of the exiles and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the historical land of Israel, has been at the heart of Jewish prayer for almost two millennia. This connection to the Jewish texts (Bible, Talmud, prayer books) ought to have solidified the pedigree of Jewish national self-determination as a long-standing objective, even if the Jewish community had not pursued it actively since the last joint Samaritan/Jewish revolts against the Byzantine Empire. But the word “Zionism” has not had this effect. Instead, the use of the word as a neologism has been helpful to people who seek in it something foreign to Jewish texts and traditions, by way of putting daylight between the word “Jewish” and the political project of Jewish national self-determination. A change in terminology from “Zionism” to “Jewish national self-determination” would force opponents to make their case against Jewish national self-determination—important at a time when the principle of national self-determination is broadly accepted, and indeed is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as an integral aspect of the process of global political emancipation. It would also challenge the view that Jews are a religion, not a people, contrary to the self-perception of most Jews. This classification is of course applicable to anyone or any state that accepts that the principle of national self-determination applies to Jews whether they live in Israel or outside, and whether they are Jewish or not.
Objectors to Jewish nationalism or national self-determination in the historic homeland of the Jews usually supports a sovereign Palestinian Arab majority state within the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine, what they call Palestine. For this reason, I think that the term “Palestinian Arab nationalism,” or “Palestinian Arab national self-determination” should be used in place of “anti-Zionism.” An accurate conceptualization ought to encompass Arab, and not simply Palestinian, nationalism/national self-determination, given that the texts and charters of the Palestinian movements and parties universally include this dual Palestinian and Arab identity. The Palestinian Arab national movement also enjoys the economic, military, and cultural support of other countries in the Arab League. This dual aspect of Palestinian Arab nationalism, local and regional, is a feature of the movement.
This redesignation is clear and empirically verifiable; it would also put to rest the claim on the part of so many anti-Zionists to be on the side of the human or the universal, opposing the Zionist who (in their estimation) are on the side of chauvinism. There are no universalists or anti-nationalists in the conflict; rather, there are nationalists wanting a nation state for their group on either side. Indeed though many anti-Zionist groups use neutral or universalist terminology like a state for all its citizens or a land for all, their support an Arab majority in the land of the former Mandate of Palestine through the return of all Palestinian refugees and an end of the Jewish law of return is the starting point of all explicitly Palestinian Arab nationalist projects. Thus this proposed classification of course also applies to Jewish anti-Zionists, including Israelis and other international supporters, and covers all the political projects premised upon Palestinian Arabs being a majority and creating a Palestinian Arab state in the historic British Mandate of Palestine—whatever their approach to Jewish Israelis living in the land.
A renaming of Zionism and anti-Zionism then leads to the question of their classification on the political map, as competing nationalisms/movements of national self-determination. This, in turn, requires a review of various classifications of national self-determination and nationalism more broadly.
In the nineteenth century, actors and commentators viewed national self-determination in Europe and the Americas through the prism of the French Revolution, and thus as left-wing. Indeed, the Left-Right divide itself emerged from the French Revolution (1789), shaped by two distinct position on politics, the law, the economy, and culture. Those seated on the Left sought a national assembly of citizens, equality before the law, an end to feudal rent, and freedom of religion. Those on the right wanted to maintain the three estates and royal power, the seigneurial courts, feudal dues, and cultural control by the Church. In the decades following the French Revolution, national liberation movements in the Balkans and central Europe sought their independence from imperial rule, favoring in its place national sovereignty organized around the left-wing political demands of the French Revolution. As with the Third Estate, which revolted against the nobility during the French Revolution, these national groups rose up and defeated their imperial masters, like the Serbs (1821-1829), and Greeks (1823)—often with some assistance from rival empires. In the Armenian case (1826-1828), where the majority, numbering in the millions, lived in the diaspora, repatriation, aided by a rival Empire, was also part of the process of seeking national self-determination. Similar left-wing political demands characterized national liberation movements in the Americas (1770s-1850s)—albeit against the metropole rather than the king and nobles, and against taxation or monopolies rather than feudal dues. Leaders of these movements and observers heralded the creation of republics across the Americas as a major achievement of modern political emancipation.
Creole independence movements in the Americas introduced the first contradictions in left-wing designations of national liberation movements. Despite their self-understanding, Creole national movements encompassing the American Revolution and the independence movements of the Latin American and Caribbean states from Spain and Portugal differed from the national liberation movements in Europe in significant ways. First, they were led by the imperial diasporas who no longer wanted to be controlled by the metropole, not by the conquered peoples who wanted to be freed from an empire that had conquered them. Further, these Creole elites (that is, the descendants of the European conquerors) called for left-wing political rights for themselves, but left indigenous populations (and also, in many cases, enslaved Africans too) in much the same situation that they had been in under European colonialism—politically, legally, economically, and culturally. The great exception to this in the Americas was Haiti, where enslaved Africans fought against and expelled the French colonists (native Haitians, the Taino, died due to disease and slavery in the first century after Columbus’s arrival on the island). Haiti’s example was however so dangerous to Creole states that they did their best to isolate and destroy it. As a result of this occlusion, these new states perceived themselves in the tradition of the French Revolution as Republican or left-wing, having liberated the new nation of Americans or Mexicans from the colonial British and Spanish colonial yokes respectively. In reality, though, they were maintaining a feudal/colonial system, just without the metropole. This unacknowledged contradiction is so fundamental to Creole nationalism that it took many of these countries until the twentieth century to accept and address the nationalist political, legal, cultural, and economic claims of their indigenous communities; indeed, some still have not taken this step.
Contradictions in left-right characterizations of national sovereignty continued to multiply throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The position of nationalism and national self-determination on the left-right continuum, broke down further during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The French Revolution had created a Right-Left division on four issues: politics, law, economy, and the culture (the last understood broadly to include religion) around national citizenship. Over the same period, Communists challenged this republican division and its four components with a Right-Left division based on one factor alone: the economy. Without going into the convoluted history of Marxism and the national question (whereby national self-determination could be a reactionary or revolutionary force, depending on whether it hastened the collapse of capitalism and a proletarian revolution or not), Marxists viewed national self-determination instrumentally, and also viewed culture and the law in much the same vein. They occasionally supported independence, cultural autonomy, legal equality, religious freedom, and local economic development for different national groups, that for republicans belonged on the nationalist left side of the aisle; and occasionally annexation, cultural assimilation, suppression of religious practice, displacement, resource exploitation, famine, forced labor, and legal disabilities, which belonged on the imperialist right. Both approaches were adopted at different times by the Soviet Union and China. For communist Socialists, economic policies trumped other considerations; republicans continued to maintain previous categories, albeit with increasing disparities.
National movements themselves subdivided further into right and left variants over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating further ambiguities in the political classification of nationalism. While nationalists in formerly imperial territories opposed imperialism and feudalism by definition, seeking national citizenship instead, otherwise they found themselves increasingly divided. Culturally, some adopted a classically left-wing position like freedom of religion, while others entrenched a specific church; economically, some supported labor and peasants, while others represented landed or industry interests. Politically and legally, some sought to disenfranchise or even expel ethnic and religious minorities, while others protected them. This last issue itself has had no stable left-right classification over the period. In the nineteenth century, many left-wing independence movements simply expelled imperial diasporas while giving minority rights to other religious and ethnic minorities. This was the case in the Balkans, Haiti, and the Caucuses, a distinction between the two groups made on political grounds. After The Great War, right-wing national movements usually advocated expulsion while left-wing ones espoused minority rights for all minorities including imperial diasporas. This pattern is evident in the new states of Central and Eastern Europe. This however changed after World War II, when even left-wing nationalist parties expelled the German imperial diaspora on the grounds of its imperial irredentism. For their part, national movements around the world expected, and often hastened, the departure not only of European colonial bureaucrats but also the European imperial diaspora, as happened in Algeria and India. This would change again in the 1990s, when observers on the left expected Baltic countries to give the Russian imperial diaspora minority rights rather than expelling them, even though this minority is barred from declaring independence or joining Russia. Finally among national groups with an imperial history, nationalism often meant advocating imperial control of current or former territories. This certainly animated the imperialist policies of the Nazis, despite their moniker as “national” socialists. To this day, differences on the economy, culture, politics, and the law remain the mainstay of political parties of the Left and Right in democracies based on national citizenship.
In light of these ambiguities, it is possible to both explain current left-wing designations of Jewish and Palestinian Arab nationalism and to revise them. Jewish national self-determination could readily be reclassified as a left-wing national movement, with right-wing and left-wing variants. It certainly fits the left-wing program—political representation and sovereignty for a previously subject people in its historical homeland. As occurred with the Armenian national movement, Jewish national self-determination also included the repatriation of large numbers of Jews, though not the entire diaspora. At the same time, like other national movements in Central and Eastern Europe and the Levant, over time Jewish self-determination has developed left and right-wing variants on politics, the law, economy, and culture. This can be seen in the differences between Herzl and socialist Zionists, later between Herut and Mapai, and to this day between the Democrats, Shas, Likud, and Otzma Yehudit, to give but a few examples. All of the Jewish nationalist parties historically and to this day (with the exception of the outlawed Kach, which called for the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship), accept the current policy of minority rights for all ethnic and religious groups in the state of Israel especially Palestinian Arabs and the Druze. They differ on whether to support a Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza and the repatriation of Israelis therein to the state of Israel; to support the status quo of Israeli security control with Palestinian Arab self-government over both areas; or to annex these territories and offer Palestinian Arabs therein local self-government but not Israeli citizenship as well encourage migration for Palestinian Arabs from Gaza.
Based on the same considerations, Palestinian Arab nationalism, along with Syrian and Iraqi Arab nationalisms, could readily be reclassified as a right-wing national movement in the Creole mold, with right-wing and left-wing variants on political, cultural, legal, and economic policies. The Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent creation of new Arab-led states in the Levant under European mandates represented—like the Creole independence movements in the Americas—two contradictory processes on the Left-Right spectrum. It was an emancipation from Ottoman power; but it was also the imposition of Arab hegemony on diverse pre-Arab populations, under the guise of separate Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Palestinian states based on the old Arab imperial caliphate. As with South American Creole nationalism, the borders of these new countries were the outcome of immediate power plays by interested parties (the French, the British, and various Arab leaders) and older imperial administrative units. From then until the Oslo peace process almost eight decades later, both secular Palestinian Arab nationalists and Islamist Palestinian Arab nationalists (in common with Arab nationalists elsewhere in the Levant) adopted a program of Arab political and cultural hegemony across the entire territory of the British Mandate of Palestine, albeit with significant differences on religion, political structure, and the economy particularly between secular and Islamist parties and movements. Since Oslo, however, the Palestinian Authority has accepted Israel as a de facto reality by participating in the negotiations towards a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—even though they continue to reject Israel as a Jewish state. Likewise, the Palestinian Arab nationalist parties in Israel, like Balad, Hadash, Ta’al, reject Israel as a Jewish state and Jewish nationalism advocating Jewish religious and language rights in Israel instead. Ra’am in contrast accepts Israel as a Jewish state as a de facto reality.
These revisions run against a significant cross section of public opinion. In much of the Western public sphere, and even among much of the self-described Israeli Left, Palestinian Arab nationalism is considered left-wing and specifically as anti-imperialist—and Jewish nationalism as right-wing and imperialist. How did this come to be?
Historical events, the influence of Arab nationalism, and modern historiography have all reinforced the narrative of Palestinian Arab nationalism as anti-imperialist and Jewish nationalism as imperialist. The Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire helped to situate Arab nationalism as anti-imperial in outlook, even though their pre-Ottoman past was itself imperial. The British and French betrayal of other national movements in the area, or their reclassification as sectarian—the Assyrian and Kurdish movements as examples of the first, and the Maronite for the second—and the subsequent creation of Arab states in the region gave official imprimatur to the idea of the Arab nation with religious or cultural minorities as the indigenous order. Geographical divisions in modern historiography have perpetuated separate discussions of Europe and the Levant that maintain certain false disparities. Various national groups in both the Levant and Europe had been under imperial rule for a millennium or more, and many had large imperial diasporas within their historic borders. Without making this point, the notion that Jewish or Assyrian history is so far in the past as to make the national demands irrelevant makes sense. But otherwise—comparing Jewish or Assyrian history to (for example) Finnish, Latvian or Czech or Slovak history, then the notion does not make sense. In a similar vein, chronological division in modern historiography skew our understanding. Arab migration and population growth is tracible; first with Arabs achieving a majority after the Crusades, and then a significant increase via population growth and immigration from neighboring regions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to economic development in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. But Jewish history can also be tracked. Jewish presence in the land was continuous, although when they actually became a minority is unclear; perhaps as early as the second century, or perhaps not until after Arab conquest. Similar questions could be asked of other Levantine national groups. Different chronologies and comparison lead to different perceptions.
Colonial economic interests and then Cold War alliances further explain why many observers continue to classify Arab nationalists as left wing despite their right-wing stances. It is well-known that the Palestinian Arab national leadership, some Iraqi-, Egyptian-, and Syrian-Arab nationalists, and prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. Arab nationalist explain this collaboration as anti-British rather than in ideological terms. The French and the British implicitly strengthened this interpretation by their reluctance to try Nazi collaborators from the region, in order to maintain their economic interests. Further, once the USSR and Arab nationalist states and movements developed closer ties in the 1950s, they were treated as left-wing despite any past and even continued ties to fugitive Nazis in the leadership. Similarly, those outside of it, like Israel despite its socialism, were treated as right-wing. Left-wing observers and scholars have also adopted this approach. The political nature of this classification becomes clear if it is compared with the classification of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe. There, the Soviet Union and the local communist leadership had both political and ideological reasons to try and execute nationalists who were Nazi collaborators. In some cases, local communist leaders used the specter of collaboration to delegitimize the entire national movement itself. This was the case with Slovakia and Croatia, who were subsequently reintegrated in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia respectively. Left-wing scholarship and public opinion has adopted this contrasting approach with both European and Arab nationalist movements.
Palestinian Arab nationalists and their global supporters in the public sphere also misrepresent their history through analogy. Since the postwar period, Communists have supported national liberation in the Third World—and, since the 1970s, indigenous communities outside of Communist states. In this context, Communist-aligned academics have furthered arguments about Palestinian Arab indigeneity. They have compared Jewish nationalism to British colonialism in the Americas and Australia, and Palestinian nationalism to indigenous rights movements. As a result they have presented the Nakba as the imperialist expulsion of an indigenous people. The problem with this narrative is that it rests on the erasure of the conditions of the 1948 war. That war began with the combined forces of several Arab League countries invading the newly-created State of Israel. The Nakba is the unintended outcome of a multi-state invasion to quash a national movement, and has no parallel among imperial expulsions of indigenous populations. Much to the contrary, in fact: it does find a parallel among failed imperial suppressions of national movements, such as the Ottoman Empire’s suppression of Serbia. By way of contrast, Palestinian Arab nationalists and sympathetic academics rarely discuss the expulsion of Jews from the Arab countries that followed the Nakba. This serves to occlude the tie between Palestinian Arab nationalism and Arab nationalism more broadly based on the imperial heritage of the Arab empires. These comparisons are clearly political given the dearth of comparisons between either Palestinian Arab or Jewish nationalism with national movements—in Europe, the Caucuses, and the Levant, in the scholarship and in the public sphere. They also stretch accepted definitions of indigeneity, relying on truncated chronologies of the region.
Thanks to these historical, political, and historiographical developments, Palestinian Arab nationalism is now so consistently coded as left-wing that many left-wing Jews who seek to remain on the Left feel obliged to redefine their identity. Many have turned to what they call Diasporism.
Diasporism—like anti-Zionism, another term with no political content—ought to be replaced with autonomy or nationalist or ideological assimilation. Diasporism is mainly used today to indicate that one opposes Zionism and thinks that Jews ought to remain in or move to the diaspora. This view, however, lacks any delineation of the politics of such a choice. Historically, it had clearer political content—cultural and even political autonomy within another state in the diaspora, diaspora nationalism. While Bundism, the ideology of autonomous Yiddish-speaking Jewish socialist communities in the diaspora, is a thing of the past, there are still some diaspora nationalists who correctly ought to be called autonomists. The ultra-Orthodox, for example, should be classified as autonomists, as their objective is to retain as much cultural and religious autonomy as possible. This is also the position (albeit with some variation) of someone like Daniel Boyarin, the Israeli-American scholar of religion, though he advocates far less separation from the majority than what the ultra-Orthodox favor. In either case, autonomists are not seeking full succession or independence. The majority of so-called Diasporists today do not however fit this pattern; rather, they can best described as assimilationists.
Assimilation, the actual political position of the majority of self-identified Diasporists, comes in two forms: national and ideological. National assimilation describes those people living in the diaspora who identify primarily with the culture of the country where they live and who identify as such, for example by calling themselves American or Argentinian. Ideological assimilation describes those people living in the diaspora who identify primarily with an ideology like socialism or liberalism. Generally, both retain some Jewish practice, but do not view Jewish ethnicity or cultural orientation as a defining feature of their national or ideological identity. Both ideological and national assimilationists sometimes make a connection or see a harmony between Jewish ideas and those of their chosen movement or national identity, but prioritize the objectives of the latter. There is of course another group who claim that their national or ideological identities and their support for Jewish or Palestinian Arab nationalism are aligned. This has been a classic position of diaspora groups in the Americas that lobby on behalf of their national homelands. Today most self-proclaimed Jewish Diasporists advocate for Palestinian Arab nationalism.
Such a proposed renaming and reclassification of Zionism, anti-Zionism, and Diasporism has important implications. First, it opposes the current orthodoxy that Palestinian Arab nationalism is an inherently Left-wing. Rather, a Left-wing orientation for the Middle East supports the small peoples therein, not creole national movements, and opposes the delegitimization of Jewish nationalism. Indeed Palestinian Arab and/or other Arab nationalists can abandon their Creole orientation and become Jewish, Kurdish, Maronite, or Druze nationalists as well as proud Arab nationalists. Second, it calls for a return to considering all features of the French Revolutionary left-right divide—namely economic, legal, political, and cultural emancipation, not simply economic rentierism. Taking up all of these dimensions offers clear criteria to bring us closer to justice in many conflicted regions. It can help in specifying an alternative path, whether through autonomy, independence, or minority rights in areas where empires, Creole nationalism, or communism continues to oppress historical peoples. Conversely, it can guide new nation states in carving out political, legal, economic, and cultural rights for minorities, including imperial diasporas with regional or national identities. Finally, it can assist in refocusing attention on rentierism as a pressing issue in its own right. The French Revolution has served as a major template to emancipate Europe and the world. Today even conservative parties have, to use the revolutionary analogy, crossed the aisle, abandoning the hierarchies of the ancien regime. But the emancipatory process is not complete.