Is Zionism Racism?

ROBERT ROSENTHAL

JAN 11, 2026

Republished from The Progressive Jew

 

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

In 1991, Israel demanded repeal of 3379 as a condition for attending the Madrid Peace Conference, and George H.W. Bush’s administration leaned hard on governments across the world to make it happen. The revocation was a product of raw power, not a moral epiphany.

In 1975, the UN General Assembly got it right. Zionism is racism.

More Than “Self‑Determination”

Bari Weiss, the ubiquitous Zionist and Trump administration minder at CBS News, told Margaret Hoover that Zionism is “the belief in the Jewish right to self‑determination somewhere in our historic homeland between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Is it really that simple?

Britannica defines Zionism more broadly as “a Jewish nationalist movement with the goal of the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews.”

Here’s a stripped‑down version: Zionists support a state in Palestine controlled by Jews. Everything else flows from that.

A “Jewish State” With Unequal Rights

The 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel proclaims “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz‑Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

It then promises that this state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”

Those lofty words were undercut almost immediately. Israel ethnically cleansed Palestine, imposed military rule on Palestinian citizens inside the Green Line for nearly two decades, seized vast tracts of Palestinian land under “absentee” laws, blocked refugees from ever returning, and structured immigration and nationality law to massively privilege Jews while treating Palestinians as a demographic problem to be contained, all in an effort to maximize the size and Jewish purity of the “Jewish state.”

The contradiction is baked in: a “Jewish state” on a land that was overwhelmingly non‑Jewish can’t deliver real equality without giving up the project’s core.

A Catastrophe Foretold

The set of recommendations that came to be known as the UN Partition Plan were adopted in 1947. Resolution 181 would give the proposed “Jewish state” about 55% of Mandatory Palestine, even though Jews were only around a third of the population and owned just a small fraction of the land.

Palestinians were excluded from the drafting process; their consent or lack thereof was simply not a factor. A “Jewish state” was to be planted over most of a country that, in 1900, was 90-95% non‑Jewish, and still about two‑thirds non‑Jewish by 1947.

This I know: had the tables been turned, Jews would never have accepted the mirror image of that deal.

The predictable result was the Nakba (“Catastrophe”): the mass expulsion and flight of more than 750,000 Palestinians in 1947-49; the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages; and the permanent denial of their right to return. This wasn’t a regrettable side effect; it was how a Jewish majority was manufactured.

Even Worse Than Apartheid

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) defines racial discrimination as any distinction or preference based on “race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin” that has the purpose or effect of impairing equal enjoyment of rights.

Under modern human rights law, racism has never been limited to skin color. Treating Palestinians as an inferior group because they’re non‑Jewish, Arab natives of that land falls squarely within that definition of racial discrimination.

International law defines apartheid as inhuman acts committed to establish and maintain domination of one racial group over another in a regime of systematic oppression and discrimination. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, among others, have concluded that Israeli authorities meet those tests: a single regime designed to maintain Jewish domination over Palestinians across the land, enforced through systematic oppression and inhumane acts.

Many South African veterans of the anti‑apartheid struggle, along with leading human rights analysts, have argued that in key respects Israel’s system is even more brutal than the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa.

From the start of the State of Israel, Zionism produced an unspeakably cruel system of segregation, expulsion, and legal hierarchy: 

Refugee exclusion: Jews from places like Brooklyn or Los Angeles with no traceable connection to that land can “return” under the Israeli Law of Return, but Palestinian refugees from places like Jaffa or Haifa can’t go home.

Land expropriation and ghettoization: Vast areas were seized as “state land” and systematically reserved for Jewish use, while Palestinian communities were hemmed in, unrecognized, occupied, or denied basic services.

Separate tracks for citizenship and nationality: Israel distinguishes between citizenship (“Israeli”) and nationality (“Jewish,” “Arab,” etc.), with key national rights reserved for Jews as a collective.

Today, nearly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under military rule, while Jewish settlers next door live under Israeli civil law. In Gaza, about 2 million Palestinians have been confined for years under blockade and, since 2023, subjected to levels of destruction and starvation that numerous genocide and human rights experts say amount to genocide.

At least half of the people Israel effectively controls can’t vote for the government that dominates their lives, for one reason only: they aren’t Jewish.

In 2018, Israel removed the mask. The Nation‑State Basic Law declares that “the State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self‑determination,” and that “the right to exercise national self‑determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

That is what apartheid looks like when it writes itself into basic law.

Every Israeli election is a referendum on how to manage this apartheid regime – not whether it should exist, but how aggressively to entrench, expand, or rebrand it.

Racism From the Top Down

This isn’t just about structures. It’s about how Palestinians are talked about and imagined – especially by the people in charge.

       David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.

• David Ben‑Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, wrote in a letter to his son: “We must expel the Arabs and take their place … and if we have to use force… then we have force at our disposal.”
• Golda Meir popularized the hugely racist idea that Palestinians don’t truly love their own children, saying, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
• On the day of an election, Benjamin Netanyahu warned supporters that “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left‑wing organizations are busing them out,” a racist dog whistle casting Palestinian citizens who vote as a threat.
• As he announced a complete siege on Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallantdeclared, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”: language that dehumanized an entire besieged population and helped license mass violence.
• Former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef preached: “It is forbidden to be merciful to (the Palestinians). You must send missiles to them and annihilate them… waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world.”

When your founders, prime ministers, defense ministers, and chief rabbis talk this way about the Indigenous people under their control, the problem isn’t a few “bad apples.” It’s the barrel.

A Public Steeped in Ethnic Cleansing

These ideas have taken root in the mainstream.

• A 2025 survey by Penn State professor Tamir Sorek, published in Haaretz, found that 82% of Jewish Israelis supported “the transfer (forced expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries,” and 56% supported forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel.
• A 2016 Pew survey found that 48% of Israeli Jews agreed that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.”
• A separate study found an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis agreeing that “there are no innocents in Gaza” – a mindset that makes indiscriminate killing easier to accept.

These aren’t fringe numbers. They’re what a society looks like when racial supremacy has been normalized.

A Racist Movement From the Start

Zionism didn’t start out as a human rights movement that later “went wrong.” It was born inside Europe’s colonial, racial order, and it borrowed that world’s assumptions almost wholesale.

In an 1895 diary entry, Theodor Herzl laid out his plan for dealing with the native population of Palestine:

“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 process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

He also cast a Jewish commonwealth as a civilizational outpost:

It would be “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

That’s textbook colonial racism: Europeans as “civilization,” the Indigenous population as “barbarism” to be displaced or ruled.

From the beginning, Herzl’s project relied on the idea that Jews, as a group, had a superior claim to the land and a superior right to decide who could live there. That’s not an accidental policy failure. That’s the definition of a racist movement.

My Experience in Zionist Racism

Those are the facts. Here’s my firsthand experience:

I grew up in a super pro‑Zionist Jewish community in Northern New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, during the Baby Boom. I was taught that Palestinians had smaller brains than Jews; that they were inherently violent; that they hated us for being Jews; and that, given the chance, they’d slaughter us all.

Decades later, through extensive reading and friendships I developed with Palestinians, I learned that I was terribly misled. As a child, I never even heard of the Nakba. Palestinian Muslims consider Jews “people of the book.” The wonderful Palestinian people don’t hate Jews. Like many Jews, they dislike Zionism. And an overwhelming majority of Palestinians have chosen nonviolent responses to the continuous violence of Israeli oppression.

As I’ve compared notes with other progressive Jews of my generation, it’s clear that our early environment wasn’t an outlier. It was the water we swam in.

In decades of conversations, virtually every committed Zionist I’ve engaged with at length about Palestine‑Israel has eventually revealed racist assumptions: that Palestinians are “less civilized,” “don’t value life,” or are “by nature” prone to terror. Almost every Zionist I’ve asked about the right of Palestinian refugees to return – a basic human right recognized in international law and a cornerstone of any just peace – has opposed it.

The polling lines up with those conversations. A 2018 Geocartography poll, reported in +972 and Middle East Monitor, found that only about 16% of Jewish Israelis supported any form of Palestinian refugee return. That distressingly low figure may be even lower today.

In recent years, powerful institutions have tried to redefine criticism of Israel and Zionism as a form of antisemitism. When that move is used to suppress discussion of Israel’s discriminatory laws or to punish Palestinians and their allies for describing their own oppression, it doesn’t fight racism; it encourages it. Human rights and academic bodies have warned that such efforts amount to anti‑Palestinian racism, erasing Palestinian experience and shielding a racist system from scrutiny.

Zionism Is Indeed Racism

Look at the pattern:

• A movement that set out to build a state for one ethno‑religious group on a land where another people already lived.
• Founders who openly planned to “spirit” the native poor across the border and become a “rampart of Europe against Asia.”
• A state that promises equality on paper while denying millions of Indigenous people basic human rights, and that legally reserves national self‑determination to Jews alone.
• Leaders who speak of Palestinians as expendable, hateful, or less human – and a public, generation after generation, taught to see them that way.

Call it colonialism. Call it supremacy. Call it apartheid.

The appropriate word for a political project that systematically privileges one group and dispossesses and subordinates another is racism. Though they won’t generally admit it, even as they demonize and dehumanize Palestinians, a very substantial share of Zionists consider Jews superior to Palestinians. Many Zionists now seem to use a professed belief in a “two‑state solution” they themselves view as virtually impossible as cover for accepting or even preferring endless oppression of the “other” they view as inferior.

Zionism – a movement I belonged to for more than half my life – is a racist movement.

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