The idea of Palestine stands for concrete justice; it conveys “that invincible Palestinian desire to keep hold of what is right and to reject what is wrong.” In Edward Said’s conception, this idea is, through and through, a worldly matter; it must remain free of a “metaphysical rationale” or a “divinely ordained trans-historical scheme.” How does the idea of Palestine relate, then, to Zionism? Does it compel Zionists to de-Zionize, to resist metaphysical claims to territory? Though Said spent his whole life critiquing Zionism’s genocidal impact on the Palestinian people, he himself refused to adopt the language of negation. In his late interview with Ari Shavit, Said expressed his aversion to words like “de-Zionize,” noting he was “ill at ease with talk of dismantling.” Such “apocalyptic language” announces violence, a hardening of your enemies’ convictions. Said insisted he was not calling on Zionists “to commit hara-kiri”; they could continue to claim “their Jewish identity and their connection to the land, so long as it doesn’t keep the others out so manifestly.”
But isn’t a moderate Zionism oxymoronic, itself a liberal Zionist fantasy? Isn’t some form of symbolic suicide the only way to do justice to the idea of Palestine? Here, I would argue that remaining faithful to Said means betraying him, going beyond his humanist sensibilities, and taking up anti-Zionism as the expression of an unwavering fidelity to universal liberation and the idea of Palestine. A universalist anti-Zionism—an emancipatory anti-Zionism open to all—that explicitly deploys the kind of “apocalyptic language” decried by Said crystallizes the faultline: “treason” to Zionism is loyalty to liberation—for Jews, Palestinians, and more.
Actually Existing Zionism Versus Zionisms
Many liberal Zionists disidentify with the belligerent political or religious Zionism of the Likud Party and condemn its excesses. Following the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Israeli-occupied Lebanon, Emmanuel Levinas pointed to the contrast between the instrumentalist political Zionism of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon (then Minister of Defense) and the ethical Zionism of over 300,000 protesters in Tel Aviv who demonstrated against their government’s actions. However, that same Sharon was elected Israel’s Prime Minister in 2001. Furthermore, recent polling reflects little public outrage over the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza. In 2025, a poll indicated that 76 percent of Israeli Jews believed there were “no innocents in Gaza”—despite over half of the Palestinian population in Gaza being under 18 years old. Wilful ignorance, coldness and indifference toward the Palestinian neighbour prevail, raising the question of what liberalism means when it tolerates or even endorses the othering and mass murder of civilians. The majority of Israelis are seemingly okay with genocide and ethnic cleansing, especially if it is couched as a security matter. Though liberal Zionists don’t speak in unison, polls show that many don’t want Palestinians as neighbors inside or outside the Green Line. In the words of Ilan Pappé, “their basic wish is for Jewish citizens to live in a democratic and pluralist society from which Arabs are excluded.” They’ve accepted the government’s goal of ethnic cleansing, euphemistically referred to as “transfer” or “free choice.” Liberal Zionists can still believe that the Gaza catastrophe refers to a humanitarian crisis, not a colonial crisis. The problem in this view remains one of excess rather than a fundamental ideological antagonism. In faulting mismanagement of the war, and, ultimately, Hamas (held responsible for Israel’s killing of their compatriots), liberal Zionists find a way to differentiate their own beliefs from the overtly criminal Zionism of the Netanyahus, Ben-Gvirs, and Smotrichs of the world. Yet this distinction between political or religious Zionists and liberal Zionists obfuscates the reality on the ground, which is one of continuous expropriation of Palestinian land and the elimination, via expulsion and death, of its Palestinian inhabitants. All Israeli political candidates who could vie for the prime ministership (including Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid) embrace the illegal practice of annexation and share the dream/nightmare of a Greater Israel.
To mount an effective critique of Zionism requires scrutinizing Zionist reason and challenging Zionism across all its dimensions—as a colonial ideology and a legal-economic regime underpinned by an anti-Palestinian libidinal economy. Crucially, I am not describing aspirational Zionisms here but actually existing Zionism: the ferocious Zionism of the Occupation, of settler colonialism, of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The actualization of Zionism has always resulted in the dissolution of Palestinians. Fayez Sayegh made this point in 1960s: “Zionist colonisation could not possibly assume the physical proportions envisaged by Zionism while the Arab people of Palestine continued to inhabit its homeland.” Sayegh stresses the ontological devastation of Zionist colonialism: “Israel is, because Palestine is not: and Palestine is not, only because Israel is. The being of Israel is therefore an act of elimination: it is the non-being of Palestine.” Understanding Zionism (the passion for Zion) doesn’t invalidate my anti-Zionism but explains it. Anti-Zionists are not indifferent to Zionism’s appeal—we repeatedly speak up for Jewish security and against Jewish hatred—but we take issue with Zionism’s phantasmatic redemption narrative, which is reliant on the notion that the ends justify the means. Centering actually existing Zionism as a historical ideology rather than a fixed and timeless identity avoids the trappings of an essentializing Ziophilia or Ziophobia. In Fanonian fashion, we affirm that all forms of abstraction halt critical thought and projects of liberation.
The idea of Palestine thus compels us to take stock of what a Zionist Israel does. Actually existing Zionism embraces oppressive tools, practices, and technologies of domination. The term “Ziofascism” describes the deep affinity between Zionism and fascism, attesting to a system whose modus operandi is the oppression of the Indigenous Palestinian population for the benefit of a colonial body that dreams of, and actively works toward, a Greater Israel—a Zionist Israel from the river to the sea, cleansed of Palestinians. Unlike liberal Zionists, Ziofascists are more aware and honest about their ambitions—to push Palestinians further and further into the Fanonian “zone of nonbeing,” where asphyxiation of the enemy is the state’s default mode of (non)relationality. In a Zionist Israel, anti-Palestinianness emerges as hegemonic: being anti-Palestinian is as natural as the air you breathe. Zionist breath means Palestinian asphyxiation. Immersed in Blut und Boden ideology, Ziofascists don’t bother with a Greater Israel with a humane face. Their right-wing politicians run on apartheid and carceral logics. Indeed, the cruder the violence (a violence uninterested in hiding itself) the better.
Keeping actually existing Zionism squarely in view lays bare the movement’s murderous logic, rooted in the planned ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Though a number of liberal Zionists today disavow Zionism’s close kinship with other European colonial projects, early Zionist leaders viewed themselves as colonists, and fully expected the resistance they were met with from the non-white Natives of the land. For example, Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, speaking in 1923 from the position of a Zionist invader, carefully sets the stage of the colonial encounter in historical Palestine, signaling an irresolvable antagonism between Natives and settlers. For Zionism to take hold and flourish, the Indigenous population must be afflicted with an immobilizing despair (an acceptance that colonization is your destiny). Palestinians must be made to forego any national aspirations: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’” The words “resists colonists” give the lie to Zionism’s claim to innocence regarding its settler-colonial enterprise.
In 1948, following this colonial logic, the British-trained Haganah (the dominant Zionist paramilitary force) implemented Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), a military blueprint explicitly designed to depopulate swaths of Palestinian towns and villages. As Sumaya Awad and Annie Levin observe, the Dalet Plan amounted to an annihilative occupation of Palestinian land:
The Haganah was divided into brigades, each with the responsibility of occupying a list of villages. Occupation most often entailed complete destruction. Few villages were left intact after Plan D had run its course. This was a deliberate campaign to raze all Palestinian homes, schools, and hospitals to the ground so there would be nothing left for Palestinians to return to.
And it is crucial to underscore that “all Zionist factions participated” in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; the baseline collective belief was that the Arabs must die or go.
From Jabotinsky to Netanyahu, there is a striking continuity between the Zionist blueprint then and the blueprint for a Greater Israel now. A “non-colonial Zionism” is pure ideology; it never existed and can never exist outside this compromising history. A settler-colonial analytic returns us to a narrative whose clarity cuts through the liberal Zionist phantasmatic veneer of a democratic Israel—where 1967 is what supposedly created the problem of apartheid. What has mattered, historically and now, are Jewish national demands; and for those demands to matter, Palestinian national demands must continue to un-matter. In their chauvinistic commitment to an unshared and unshareable sovereignty, Israel’s political leaders have waged a demographic war since the state’s inception. Witness the words of Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, who, already in 1895, dreamed of a Jewish state without the Indigenous Palestinian population, poor and rich alike:
We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.
The property-owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.
This demographic war was deeply entangled in, if not fully shaped by, a colonial register. Herzl explicitly casts Jews as wise and civilized and the surrounding population savages and dupes: Israel would serve as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”
When barbarians resist displacement, the “civilized” feel all too justified in deploying brute force to remove them. As Saree Makdisi observes, “kill, kill, and kill” has been the default Zionist disposition toward Palestinians. “Wipe out Gaza” is not an aberration, mere rhetoric, but the fulfillment of the Zionist agenda. Zionism opens to genocidal tribalism. Hanin Majadli puts it succinctly: “The refusal to see Palestinians as human beings isn’t a side effect of October 7. It’s a fundamental element of Israel’s national consciousness. This element predates the latest war, the operations in Gaza, the terror attacks and the rockets. You can trace it back easily to even before the state was established.” We must leave behind the “sober” narrative of liberal Zionists once and for all. A Zionist Israel is the “fanatic Right.”
Exposing actually existing Zionism’s well-honed and persistent logic is thus integral to anticolonial critique, to the skeptical inquiry into “the kinds of assumptions, the familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought on which accepted practices rest.” Questioning Zionism’s authority introduces new possibilities in the world—none more emancipatory than the decolonization of our minds, the shedding of Zionist filters. Yet the connection between decolonizing the mind and relinquishing Zionism’s perceptual and libidinal grip is easily diluted in the hands of critical liberals such as Omer Bartov. In his more temperate account, Bartov insists that Israel must revise its sense of the order of things. He envisions, with cautious optimism, a new generation of Israelis who will refuse to weaponize Holocaust memory for political gain:
Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity.
Learning to live with the genocide is one thing, but there is a danger in making atonement for Israeli violence via guilt and “emotional devastation,” prioritizing Jewish sensibilities over the victims of the genocide and blunting decolonization’s radical material demands in the process. In Israel: What Went Wrong? Bartov tries to rescue a dying Zionist Israel: Israel didn’t have to commit genocide in Gaza; it didn’t begin as a genocidal campaign; it ultimately became one due to Israeli leadership. He rejects anti-Zionism because it fails to account for the ways Israel must be seen as the outgrowth of a national liberation movement. The creation of Israel wasn’t an original sin; the blame lies in what followed—Israel’s lack of a constitution, which created the conditions for the subjugation of Palestinians. The inference is that another Israel can exist, that Israel doesn’t need to de-Zionize. What it needs, Bartov claims, is “shock therapy.” But does shock therapy entail ontological upheavals and mutations in Israeli identity? Does it allow its nationals to confront settler-colonial reality, Israel as “a world cut in two”? It is unclear that it does for Bartov. In an interview with The New Yorker, Bartov decouples Israel from Zionism, stating that “Zionism is not reformable,” but “the state of Israel is.” Israel needs to drop Zionism as a brutal state ideology. In doing so, Bartov isolates the genocide in Gaza from the ’48 Nakba. But isn’t Bartov basically substituting a reformable Israel for an ethical Zionism? Anti-Zionism points us in the opposing direction. It underscores the need to understand the state and the ideology together. Separating Israel from Zionism is not only wishful thinking, it distorts the past, denies the fact of Israel’s coloniality, its formation as “a Zionist entity.” There is no divesting from Israel’s anti-Palestinian libidinal economy without fully embracing an anti-colonial anti-Zionism. Bartov’s liberalism neutralizes the revolutionary potential that “shock therapy” purports to announce. Simply put, Bartov still prioritizes Jewish well-being at the expense of (rather than with) Palestinian liberation. For Palestinians, the Nakba never ended; anti-Zionism keeps our eyes on the murderous track record of Zionism, on actually existing Zionism—then and now.
Anti-Zionism exposes the protracted history of Zionist violence; it contests the remarkable ease with which Zionists dismiss the coloniality of their regime—the fact that Indigenous Palestinians were always framed as a colonial problem, prompting colonial solutions. It shatters this convenient and accommodating narrative of blamelessness, redirecting attention to the structural element of Zionist un-relationality and to the prevailing ontological mood of indifference that characterizes Zionist Israel’s orientation toward the lives of its internal and external neighbors—Palestinians were never meant to co-exist with Jews. They were meant be displaced, contained, or exterminated.
The Zionist embrace of European supremacist and ethnonationalist logics made them questionable allies in the struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe. Among the Jews who most forcefully opposed Zionism as a national movement were the Bund—Jewish socialists who fought for equality and civil rights in the countries where they lived rather than agitating for a separate homeland. The Bund didn’t treat Zionism as a question impacting Jews alone; its members denounced its racist foundations and impacts. In 1938, Bundist leader Henryk Erlich damningly observed, “Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of anti-Semitism and of every kind of national chauvinism.” Zionism in practice is racist—a perversion of the fight against anti-Semitism. We should invert the Zionist slogan “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” and adopt the more accurate phrase: Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Erlich is unflinching in exposing Zionism’s supremacist drive to subjugate and mistreat others:
Zionism has become an ally of anti-Semitism. The worsening situation of the Jews throughout the world is exploited by the Zionists. The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens. The Bund, therefore, cannot see the Zionists as partners in the struggle against the reactionary forces in Poland.
“The living and functioning Zionism” adopts the European racial matrix of the human. It seeks to transform the internally colonized Jew of Poland into the colonizer of Palestine. In this respect, Zionism always aspired to join the “the Supremacist Club.” The Gaza genocide stands as proof of Zionism’s full membership.
In this light, liberal Zionism operates not as an antidote to Zionist barbarism, but as its alibi. Such “moral” framing functions to obfuscate the systemic violence intrinsic to the Zionist project. In principle, liberals want change without change (change minus a reckoning with Zionism’s racial logics, anything that would endanger their imperial interests or disturb “white innocence”). They want transformation absent ontological upheaval. They constitute the so-called “peace camp” in Israel, and, outside Israel, they are those who identify with the Jewish state and are disturbed by Palestinian suffering, those who are vaguely sympathetic to the two-state solution, as long as the idea remains at an abstract level: meaning, don’t mention dismantling the illegal settlements (we fear that it will create a civil war in Israel); don’t talk about the internationally sanctioned right of return (we want to keep Israel’s Jewish majority; we don’t like talking about a demographic war or engineering, and are certainly unwilling to forgo Jewish privileges in Israel). Such liberal Zionists are clearly not crudely fascist, nor sadistic, but they are becoming more and more comfortable with the fascist vision of a bellicose and annexationist Israel. A fascist Israel ails them, but what’s the alternative: a free Palestine? A fascist Israeli government does liberal Zionists harm (the rise of religious nationalism threatens secular Judaism), but dismantling Jewish privilege (under a Zionist horizon) is a harder pill to swallow. October 7 gave liberal Zionists a way out. If the Second Intifada in 2000 seeded suspicion among many liberal Zionists toward their Palestinian neighbors, Operation AlAqsa Flood transformed a broad segment of them into ethnonationalists almost instantly—suddenly far more invested in security and newly willing to entertain the prospect of a “Greater Israel,” so long as it is framed through the language of securitization and Jewish protection. Yet unlike the far Right, or the openly eliminationist camp, liberal Zionists do not present themselves as inherently antiPalestinian; their posture is cast as “measured.” In their view, armed struggle—any threat of violence on Israeli soil—is simply beyond the pale. These disenchanted liberals typically insist: We tried peace—remember the Oslo Accords—but your Palestinian leadership chose war. For them, Palestinian agitation and the refusal to remain confined to Gaza or segregated in the West Bank are even blamed for fueling Israel’s far Right, which, in recent years, alongside Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial coup, has begun to erode Israel’s supposedly “democratic” core.
The idea of Palestine pierces through liberal niceties and pretenses of reasonableness; it returns us to Zionism’s racial matrix and its fundamental inferiorization of the Palestinian, the non-Jew par excellence. To insist that we are dealing here with an ingrained Palestinophobia rather than security is to take to heart Aimé Césaire’s keen observation, “no one colonizes innocently.” Western powers may, on rare occasions, caution Israel about its excessive security measures, but in doing so they fail to understand that a Zionist Israel must engage in “permanent security”; its very operational logic is displacement and dispossession. Security is coloniality in practice. Zionist reason cannot think otherwise. As Lara Kilani and Leila Shomali argue, Zionist reason “contends that in order to thrive, Jewish communities must displace, dominate, incarcerate, oppress, and murder Palestinians.” Zionist normalcy and coloniality are inseparable realities.
Put slightly differently, what we’re witnessing in Palestine/Israel ever since the Zionist invasion is not a conflict but an antagonism. Conflict belongs to what Nelson Maldonado-Torres dubs the “coloniality of knowledge”—its grammar indexes a failure to see injustice and respond to an unfolding catastrophe, as one behaves instead “as if the heightened Palestinian Nakba did not demand a principled position against apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” A system can absorb conflicts, can pacify resistance. In fact, liberals love conflict management and its shallow accommodations. But an antagonism is stubborn; it festers and doesn’t go away. Antagonism, in the words of Slavoj Žižek, threatens the system, its rhythms, pointing to an incommensurability “between non-society and society, between those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose, between those without a stake in their community and those whose stakes are the greatest.” A conflict framework involves the most superficial of transformations. Antagonism casts the Palestinian problem, the idea of Palestine, in a radically different light. It is not about making the caging of Palestinians more tolerable, more livable (more humanitarian aid, less demolition of Palestinian housing, less theft of land and resources, etc.); it is about abolishing the cage (the Occupation) and the kind of state (Zionist settler colonialism) that birthed it.
The word “conflict” breeds indifference from the West and complacency from liberal Zionists; it normalizes the Occupation by conveniently occluding the colonial situation, treating it incorrectly as a dispute between two equal parties over land, as if Palestinian “disadvantages” were not constitutive of Zionist polity. Framing Palestine/Israel as a conflict sutures the wound of coloniality; it is reformist at best, delusional at worst. The language of conflicts lulls us into opting for compromise over justice. An eye for antagonisms exposes instead what Eyal Weizman describes as the “humanitarian paradox.” Palestinians might biologically survive, but they will be socially dead—whence the cruel price of humanitarianism. The focus on the antagonisms undermines the humanitarian framework that portrays Palestine/Israel as a deracialized territorial dispute; it refuses its colonial manipulation, as if the only outcome Palestinian hope for were “a racial and segregationist two-state solution, which,” as Hashem Abushama points out, “has been designed to normalise the theft of most of historic Palestine.” An anti-colonial framework names the Zionist settler as an invader of Palestinian land. Aligning the idea of Palestine with the struggle against a racist settler-colonial state places liberation front and center. In doing so, it directly challenges the system governing historic Palestine and exposes a fundamental incommensurability between Indigenous demands for equality and Israel’s democratic credentials, further highlighting what Said describes as “a kind of wedge opening up the discrepancy between Israel as it has appeared internationally [under a Zionist horizon] and as it is in fact.”
“Cracking Colonial History Open”
Committing to the idea of Palestine means de-Zionizing your mind or it means nothing at all. Edward Said worried about the apocalyptic overtones of de-Zionizing, preferring instead “the gradual transformation of Israel,” but it is hard to imagine an overcoming of Zionism—the dismantling of and disidentifying with an exclusive Jewish sovereignty—that is not experienced as an ontological upheaval, akin to a collective symbolic suicide. Under a suffocating Zionist horizon, Palestinians can only appear as irrational and hateful terrorists, obsessed with the destruction of Israel and Jews.
This distorted and distorting image is now slipping, no longer able to fix the Orientalized Palestinians as it did in the past and especially immediately after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. Another Palestinian imago is circulating more freely in the Western cultural imaginary. The Palestinian as abject victim, the skeletal child, emaciated from starvation, is now seared into our minds, and has come to counterbalance the more dominant libidinally constituted imago of the insatiable terrorist Palestinian in the Zionist collective unconscious. Is unlearning Zionism, then, the task of getting reflexive Zionists to see Palestinians as victims, or as the “victims of the victims,” as Said once put it? Hearing and reading Palestinians narrate their plight “humanizes” them, makes them more relatable, or even deserving of empathy. This is where “humanitarian reason” steps in. It drives a shift away from the naturalized Zionist perspective that frames Palestinians as a priori victimizers who even use their own people as human shields. In its place, humanitarian framing builds a sympathetic view that highlights the unjust suffering and daily humiliation of Palestinians.
This form of unlearning is far from trivial, but it is contained within the limits of humanitarian reason. This limitation is more dangerous than it might sound. It is ripe for cooptation by liberal Zionism as a “humanitarian Zionism,” functioning primarily as an accommodating logic rather than a force for undoing a framework and its constitutive harms. It tempers Palestinian derealization without overcome it, remaining deeply invested in maintaining a Zionist order. We get two versions of “racial elimination”: liberal Zionism offers genocide/ethnic cleansing in slow motion, while political/religious Zionism pursues it in an accelerated form. Humanitarian Zionism serves to secure the “good conscience” of the liberal Zionist—the phantasm of a Zionist Israel stripped of its most violent excesses. Liberals of all shades are prone to what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call the “settler moves to innocence.”
Palestinians are in a Herculean struggle for survival and liberation, facing Zionism’s settler eliminative logic. Palestinian resistance calls for a different register beyond that of success and failure. If Palestinian helplessness exhausts our unlearning, our capacity to imagine, we remain stuck within the (liberal) Zionist paradigm, “the same mode of thought.” An antagonism demands a reckoning with the system itself, with the entire socio-economic and racial apparatus of settler colonialism. Abdaljawad Omar urges us to see/learn Palestinian resistance “as an event—events that scatter the colonial order, that make visible the cracks in its presumed inevitability, and that gesture toward a different horizon altogether.” The power of Palestinian resistance lies in its capacity “to widen the horizon of political possibilities” and “to crack history open.” The idea of Palestine contributes to this cracking of colonial history. At its core it demands a de-Zionizing of Israel—it demands an Israel that fully avows and confronts its past and ongoing coloniality. Anti-Zionism is our response to a Greater Israel: an invitation to resist and divest from a murderous world, forging instead practices, values, and principles at odds with hierarchical thinking and fascist dispositions. The idea of Palestine mobilizes us to demand more, to imagine more; it rejects the “rule of the jungle,” refusing a world in which might makes right. Anti-Zionism for Palestine hungers for another world. It organizes our resistance and anger against a supremacist mindset. At its basic level, the idea of Palestine calls for dismantling the pervasive, though often disavowed, Zionist phantasm that “for me to flourish you must perish.”