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What Do We Believe?
What Do Zionists Believe?
Zionism was a movement of national liberation. It sought to establish a permanent home for the Jewish people where they could attain political independence and instigate a national renaissance. Some Zionists were inspired by a vision of religious redemption and the onset of the messianic age. For others it represented the construction of a perfect society. Others aspired to the more modest creation of a modern technological, capitalist state. The Hebrew Republic which came into being in May 1948 embellished all these possibilities. Today 38% of all Jews live in Israel. The tragedy of Zionism was that it arose during the same period of history as Arab nationalism?and in the same land. Popular perception of what the movement stood for has been shaped and distorted by the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Colin Shindler explains the evolution of Zionism as a unique ideology and provides a clear and perceptive analysis of its ideas.
- GenresPolitics
116 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
Colin Shindler
28 books12 followersColin Schindler is emeritus professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He became the first professor of Israel Studies in the United Kingdom in 2008 and was the founding chairman of the European Association of Israeli Studies (EIAS) in 2009.
He is a lecturer and broadcaster and has written and edited a number of books including: A History of Modern Israel, Israel: A History in 100 Cartoons and, most recently, the Routledge Handbook on Zionism.
He is a lecturer and broadcaster and has written and edited a number of books including: A History of Modern Israel, Israel: A History in 100 Cartoons and, most recently, the Routledge Handbook on Zionism.
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December 8, 2025
We are living in an age where Zionists, Zionism, the State of Israel and the Israeli people are being increasingly demonized and de legitimized by the media, universities and others who control public opinion. In elite circles Zionism has become a dirty word. It is therefore necessary to explore works like this that examine what Zionism really is and the origins and history of Zionism-which is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.
The author de constructs the diabolical lie that Zionism-the return of the Jews to their ancient cradle of birth is somehow ,as the far left and Islamists have brainwashed much of the world, an act of 'colonialism' and that the system of ideas behind the only democracy in the Middle East is 'fascist'.
As Shindler explains "Out of the conflicting narratives of Jew and Arab, the megaphone war between Israelis and Palestinians has reduced a complex history to a hollow sound bite. One of it's casualties has been any serious consideration of Zionism. Instead Zionists have often been deemed responsible in some left-wing publications in Europe and in the mainstream Arab media for orchestrating many acts of terrorism in the world-from the killing of Westerners in Saudi Arabia to the massacre of children in Beslan. In 2001 conspiracy theorists throughout the world were adamant that in their belief that 'Zionists' were behind the tragedy of the twin towers on 11 September 2001. In certain parts of the Arab world in particular 'the crimes of Zionism' have reached hitherto unimaginable levels of fantasy.
This mindset has been strongly influenced by the international left , ironically the European Left which is today so venomously anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli was once strongly supportive of the Zionist enterprise, the creation of the State of Israel after world War II.
But the ideology of left metamorphosized in the last few decades into a nihilistic monstrosity of tawdry Third worldism, the cult of the noble savage returned with a vengeance. Israeli Jews are depicted as too white and well to do to be objects of sympathy or understanding and the Palestinian as the exploited and dispossessed dark skinned Third world masses. It is this anti-Western third worldist cult of the noble savage mentality that also accounts for the contempt which the post-modern left to hold the white working class in Britain, persecuting the latter in favour of 'noble victims', the Third world immigrants. The neo-Maoist strategy of Yeasser Arafats' Al Fatah terrorist organization suggested that the invented Palestinian cause was an integral part of the 'struggle against imperialism and colonialism'
The left also today violently suppress any idea that anti-Zionism may be linked ever to anti-Semitism, disseminating the lie that any reference to a relationship between the two is a sinister Zionist plot to deflect condemnation of the occupation and the great Israeli crimes supposedly committed against the innocent Palestinians.
And yet Anti-Zionism is the conviction that Israel, of all the world's countries, does not have the right to exist. It is the conviction that the determination of what constitutes Israel's 'secure and defensible borders' should not be made by the Israeli people, either directly or via representation.
Israel constitutes today the world's largest Jewish community , with the numbers of Jews living in Israel approaching nearly half of the world's Jewish population. Any destruction of Israel would mean a second holocaust of Jews. The anti-Zionists claim that they are not anti-Semitic as they only hate and want to harm Jews who live in Israel. This is as absurd as claiming one is not a racist as one only hates and wants to harm Blacks who live in Africa , not Blacks elsewhere. The enemies of Israel want the physical elimination of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. This constitutes anti-Semitism.
The point is that they want a Judenreihn "Palestine" the same way that Hitler wanted a Judenreihn Europe.
Jews in Israel are targeted for one thing , being Jews.
The anti-Zionist believes that the only children, who it is justified to murder are Jewish children (in the Land of Israel).
Someone who is prejudiced against Israel or Israelis is just as much a bigot as someone who is prejudiced against Jews per se.
The point is that anti-Zionism should be treated the same as anti-Semitism BECAUSE the aim is to destroy the Jews of Israel the same way the Nazis destroyed the Jews of Israel.
I just find it interesting that if somebody is against British Jews they are anti-Semitic, if they are against American Jews they are anti-Semitic , if they are against European Jews they are anti-Semitic , but if they hate Israeli Jews they are merely 'anti-Zionist' but not anti-Semitic.
As Judea Pearl puts it : "As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide. "
Shindler quotes Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah who declared "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind and ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew, notice I do not say the Israeli".
In the past Jews were denied equal rights as individuals because they are an ehtnic group regarded as unassimalable. today they are refused. Today they are denied a collective sense of identity and self-determination bu the rejection of their right to a nation-state of their own. Why do leftwing intellectuals so violently oppose the right to statehood but not object to such claimns of other groups?
The author of the book in tracing Zionist history , shows us what never occurs to the detractors of Zionism-that Zionism was never monolithic. And he studies the development of socialist Zionism, religious Zionism and Zionism in its variable other forms.
He explains how in the late 19th Jews racial anti-antisemitism made Jews realize they could never be pure Frenchmen, Germans Austrians or Britons and had to rebuild their own nationalism , in their own ancient territory! The Land of Israel then named Palestine
Most interesting is his study of the support of the Old Left for Zionism. Anuerin Bevan, that great champion of the British working class as well as the liberal David Lloyd-George styled themselves 'Zionists'. Bevan and the Old Left of the West saw Jewish resettlement in the Land of Israel as a unique socialist experiment. In 1948 in Britain in fact the further left you were the more supportive you were of Zionism, the diametric opposite of the situation today, where the hard left are genocidally opposed to Israel even calling Israeli children 'Zionists' In 1948 The Guardian was pro-Zionist, today it is the most venomously anti-Israel newspaper in Britain.
British Labour politician Tony Benn. now an anti-Israel propagandist was once a died in the wool advocate for Israel and a regular contributor to the Labour Zionist Jewish Vanguard.
But it is how so many on the left have betrayed Israel and the Jewish people with such a radical about turn that makes me question the values and integrity of the left. How could people who supported the justice of Israel's cause simply turn on Israel in hate simply because hating Israel was now the new fashion-what ever happened to loyalty. Is it only about shifts in political fashion. Truth does not change. If something was true 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago it is still true today. Therefore what the older leftwing intellectuals such as Sartre and even the Soviet representative Gromyko's references to Zionism as a legitimate national liberation movement still must hold true today despite Zionism being the target of hate and de facto calls for genocide on the part of the post modern left.
The author also successfully describes how after the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel by the Romans, the idea of a national Jewish Home in Israel never vanished. "Ahavat Tsion, a became a dormant but dominant theme for the Jews of the Diaspora. Jerusalem was not forgotten. In their thrice daily prayers, Jews referred to the holy city and faced in it's direction. Indeed the rabbis counted 70 names for Jerusalem , and one Talmudic commentator loudly proclaimed "Ten measures of holiness descended on the world, Jerusalem took nine and the rest of the world one".
Shindler identifies with the liberal stream of Zionism. While I agree with him that Zionism should return to it's communalist and social responsibility-based roots as far as soci-economic reations between Israelis go, as opposed to Netanyahu's libertarian abomination, it seems a tall order to expect Israelis to give way to those (the Palestinians) who want to burn their children alive and drive them into the sea. Until there is a strong movement for peace and conciliation with the Israeli Jews among Palestinians, and the acceptance of the permanence of Israel as a Jewish State, talk of negotiation, compromise and a two state solution will be pie in the sky.
The author de constructs the diabolical lie that Zionism-the return of the Jews to their ancient cradle of birth is somehow ,as the far left and Islamists have brainwashed much of the world, an act of 'colonialism' and that the system of ideas behind the only democracy in the Middle East is 'fascist'.
As Shindler explains "Out of the conflicting narratives of Jew and Arab, the megaphone war between Israelis and Palestinians has reduced a complex history to a hollow sound bite. One of it's casualties has been any serious consideration of Zionism. Instead Zionists have often been deemed responsible in some left-wing publications in Europe and in the mainstream Arab media for orchestrating many acts of terrorism in the world-from the killing of Westerners in Saudi Arabia to the massacre of children in Beslan. In 2001 conspiracy theorists throughout the world were adamant that in their belief that 'Zionists' were behind the tragedy of the twin towers on 11 September 2001. In certain parts of the Arab world in particular 'the crimes of Zionism' have reached hitherto unimaginable levels of fantasy.
This mindset has been strongly influenced by the international left , ironically the European Left which is today so venomously anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli was once strongly supportive of the Zionist enterprise, the creation of the State of Israel after world War II.
But the ideology of left metamorphosized in the last few decades into a nihilistic monstrosity of tawdry Third worldism, the cult of the noble savage returned with a vengeance. Israeli Jews are depicted as too white and well to do to be objects of sympathy or understanding and the Palestinian as the exploited and dispossessed dark skinned Third world masses. It is this anti-Western third worldist cult of the noble savage mentality that also accounts for the contempt which the post-modern left to hold the white working class in Britain, persecuting the latter in favour of 'noble victims', the Third world immigrants. The neo-Maoist strategy of Yeasser Arafats' Al Fatah terrorist organization suggested that the invented Palestinian cause was an integral part of the 'struggle against imperialism and colonialism'
The left also today violently suppress any idea that anti-Zionism may be linked ever to anti-Semitism, disseminating the lie that any reference to a relationship between the two is a sinister Zionist plot to deflect condemnation of the occupation and the great Israeli crimes supposedly committed against the innocent Palestinians.
And yet Anti-Zionism is the conviction that Israel, of all the world's countries, does not have the right to exist. It is the conviction that the determination of what constitutes Israel's 'secure and defensible borders' should not be made by the Israeli people, either directly or via representation.
Israel constitutes today the world's largest Jewish community , with the numbers of Jews living in Israel approaching nearly half of the world's Jewish population. Any destruction of Israel would mean a second holocaust of Jews. The anti-Zionists claim that they are not anti-Semitic as they only hate and want to harm Jews who live in Israel. This is as absurd as claiming one is not a racist as one only hates and wants to harm Blacks who live in Africa , not Blacks elsewhere. The enemies of Israel want the physical elimination of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. This constitutes anti-Semitism.
The point is that they want a Judenreihn "Palestine" the same way that Hitler wanted a Judenreihn Europe.
Jews in Israel are targeted for one thing , being Jews.
The anti-Zionist believes that the only children, who it is justified to murder are Jewish children (in the Land of Israel).
Someone who is prejudiced against Israel or Israelis is just as much a bigot as someone who is prejudiced against Jews per se.
The point is that anti-Zionism should be treated the same as anti-Semitism BECAUSE the aim is to destroy the Jews of Israel the same way the Nazis destroyed the Jews of Israel.
I just find it interesting that if somebody is against British Jews they are anti-Semitic, if they are against American Jews they are anti-Semitic , if they are against European Jews they are anti-Semitic , but if they hate Israeli Jews they are merely 'anti-Zionist' but not anti-Semitic.
As Judea Pearl puts it : "As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide. "
Shindler quotes Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah who declared "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind and ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew, notice I do not say the Israeli".
In the past Jews were denied equal rights as individuals because they are an ehtnic group regarded as unassimalable. today they are refused. Today they are denied a collective sense of identity and self-determination bu the rejection of their right to a nation-state of their own. Why do leftwing intellectuals so violently oppose the right to statehood but not object to such claimns of other groups?
The author of the book in tracing Zionist history , shows us what never occurs to the detractors of Zionism-that Zionism was never monolithic. And he studies the development of socialist Zionism, religious Zionism and Zionism in its variable other forms.
He explains how in the late 19th Jews racial anti-antisemitism made Jews realize they could never be pure Frenchmen, Germans Austrians or Britons and had to rebuild their own nationalism , in their own ancient territory! The Land of Israel then named Palestine
Most interesting is his study of the support of the Old Left for Zionism. Anuerin Bevan, that great champion of the British working class as well as the liberal David Lloyd-George styled themselves 'Zionists'. Bevan and the Old Left of the West saw Jewish resettlement in the Land of Israel as a unique socialist experiment. In 1948 in Britain in fact the further left you were the more supportive you were of Zionism, the diametric opposite of the situation today, where the hard left are genocidally opposed to Israel even calling Israeli children 'Zionists' In 1948 The Guardian was pro-Zionist, today it is the most venomously anti-Israel newspaper in Britain.
British Labour politician Tony Benn. now an anti-Israel propagandist was once a died in the wool advocate for Israel and a regular contributor to the Labour Zionist Jewish Vanguard.
But it is how so many on the left have betrayed Israel and the Jewish people with such a radical about turn that makes me question the values and integrity of the left. How could people who supported the justice of Israel's cause simply turn on Israel in hate simply because hating Israel was now the new fashion-what ever happened to loyalty. Is it only about shifts in political fashion. Truth does not change. If something was true 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago it is still true today. Therefore what the older leftwing intellectuals such as Sartre and even the Soviet representative Gromyko's references to Zionism as a legitimate national liberation movement still must hold true today despite Zionism being the target of hate and de facto calls for genocide on the part of the post modern left.
The author also successfully describes how after the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel by the Romans, the idea of a national Jewish Home in Israel never vanished. "Ahavat Tsion, a became a dormant but dominant theme for the Jews of the Diaspora. Jerusalem was not forgotten. In their thrice daily prayers, Jews referred to the holy city and faced in it's direction. Indeed the rabbis counted 70 names for Jerusalem , and one Talmudic commentator loudly proclaimed "Ten measures of holiness descended on the world, Jerusalem took nine and the rest of the world one".
Shindler identifies with the liberal stream of Zionism. While I agree with him that Zionism should return to it's communalist and social responsibility-based roots as far as soci-economic reations between Israelis go, as opposed to Netanyahu's libertarian abomination, it seems a tall order to expect Israelis to give way to those (the Palestinians) who want to burn their children alive and drive them into the sea. Until there is a strong movement for peace and conciliation with the Israeli Jews among Palestinians, and the acceptance of the permanence of Israel as a Jewish State, talk of negotiation, compromise and a two state solution will be pie in the sky.
October 23, 2023
Very good to understand why the International Left demonises Israel
I bought this book after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing cries to "Free Palestine" to understand how the "case for Zionism" has evolved over time and also why the International Left demonises Israel. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London professor Shindler's easy-to-read book, based on his SOAS course on the history of Zionism, answers both these questions very well. Contrary to "pro-Palestinian = anti-Zionist", one learns from "What Do Zionists Believe?" that many Zionists are pro-Palestinian and in favour of the two-State solution and that such pragmatic, liberal thinking was from the start one strand of the Zionist movement.
I bought this book after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing cries to "Free Palestine" to understand how the "case for Zionism" has evolved over time and also why the International Left demonises Israel. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London professor Shindler's easy-to-read book, based on his SOAS course on the history of Zionism, answers both these questions very well. Contrary to "pro-Palestinian = anti-Zionist", one learns from "What Do Zionists Believe?" that many Zionists are pro-Palestinian and in favour of the two-State solution and that such pragmatic, liberal thinking was from the start one strand of the Zionist movement.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews