Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

5 min readMay 28, 2024

This was an accidental book. It began life as a simple Google document after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7th, 2023. I was deeply disturbed by the online explosion of disinformation, false accusations and outright slander against Israelis and their supporters. I began replying to some of it and soon realized I was writing the same things over and over again. I needed a collection of pre-written standard responses just to save myself a lot of work, so I made one.

Sometime during December of 2023, it became clear to me I was dealing with a pattern of deceit deeper than just false factual claims. People responding to me were obviously repeating accusations issuing from an intricately woven spider web of ideology. By method, it would often take a collection of half-truths and string them together into whole lies. Its purpose was to demonize Israel and to dehumanize Zionists. Through this campaign it would ultimately do the same to any Jewish person unwilling to hollow out and renounce their ethnic and religious heritage.

The people whose minds had been caught by the spider of anti-Zionist ideology could not seem to move off it no matter what they learned. The pre-written responses I had created were inadequate to such a challenge, being simple recitations of facts meant to correct the record regarding different, superficially unrelated pieces of disinformation. I needed a deeper resource which could directly address the underlying poisonous ideology creating it all. I scoured the Internet but could not find anything like that.

I was frustrated. If I, a fairly educated person pretty familiar with the details of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, was feeling overwhelmed by the volume and rapaciousness of the accusations coming from so many directions, what were younger people and less historically aware Jewish people doing? How were they handling it? I could see the standard answers I had written needed to be woven together into a narrative which respected the existence of this anti-Zionist ideology.

The result was a long essay, whose first draft I finished in early January of 2024.

It was the beginning of something which obviously is badly needed. It attempted to pick apart the different strands of the anti-Zionist spider web and disentangle its lies from its truths, one by one, providing not just proper facts but proper thinking about and answers to the underlying narrative tricks.

As time went on, I saw it was useful but its format resided in an uncomfortable middle ground: too long to be readable as a blog piece and too short to deal in satisfactory depth with each of the arguments it raised.

So, I began to break it apart into chapters and build it out. I think the result fills a unique niche in the literature on Israel as a country. It represents an excavation of the core methods and rhetorical tricks anti-Zionists rely on when forming their accusations, providing any interested reader with much needed preparation to look beyond what anti-Zionists say to see and understand the underlying spin.

What readers will not find here is backseat driving regarding decisions of Israeli war makers in Gaza. War is horrible and asymmetric war is a tangled knot of horrors. I do not know anyone who is in position to second guess any tactical decisions or errors in the current Gaza war, or to suggest how to dig Hamas out of Gaza with less tragic suffering than we currently see there. I am certainly not in such a position.

In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often hard to even recognize. In Gaza, I believe Israel is trying to solve a wicked problem. It is being asked to kill a scrambling spider, quick and poisonous, and take down its web, all the while doing it in the dark without damaging any of the eggs it has laid or victims caught in its silky strands. I don’t think another nation could be doing any better than it is.

The book is going to be easier to read for people with an understanding of the basics about Israel’s history and its conflict with the Arabs. There is an online resource on YouTube which does a great job with this basic education here.

Also, it is ironic and a bit sad a book about “Zionism and Anti-Zionism” has to be written 75 years after Zionism achieved its purpose. In a literal sense, Zionism was a movement to create a Jewish national home in the land where the Jewish people came from. That purpose was fulfilled in 1948 and Zionism, per se, ceased to exist at that time. Unfortunately, Jewish history is never so clean. Because of Israel’s seemingly unrelenting enemies, Zionism has morphed into a philosophy of simply supporting Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. No other country on earth has its very legitimacy questioned to the point it needs a name for those who simply support its existence, but here we are.

I would like to dedicate this book to Pazit Raz and her family. I hope one day she and Israel can experience the safe and peaceful everyday life they have been praying for.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly between Israel and the Arabs is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This book is for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. Zionism, Arab Feudalism, and the Tragedy of the Serfs

10. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine