(Image source: Ammar Awad for Reuters/The Atlantic)

“There was no such thing as Palestinians,” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, infamously, in a 1969 interview with the New York Times. In 1970, she clarified, “I don’t say there are no Palestinians, but I say there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people.”

Meir’s words can be seen as a refusal to see that Palestinians have had, or could ever have, a shared identity—a sense of common history, fate, or future. It can also be seen as a denial of Palestinian humanity and an excuse for violence, the same way that denying trans people’s existence is a way to negate their reality and human rights. In either case, her words highlight how Zionist identity, and Zionist claims to nationhood, are structured around the erasure and delegitimization of Palestinians—both as individual humans who exist and have equal rights to freedom and justice, and as a political group who have a right to representation and self-determination in the land currently controlled by the Israeli government.

Zionists (Christian and Jewish, American and Israeli) often assert that their identity is built on the belief that Israel has a right to exist. “Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel,” per the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a leading Zionist American Jewish organization. But what is often lost in those claims is the way that self-determination for Jewish people is predicated upon there being “no such thing as Palestinians.” For Zionists, often explicitly, sometimes implicitly, Palestinians must be erased for Israel to exist; if Palestinians exist, Israel is endangered.

Many Jews—and for that matter many Zionist non-Jews—see Zionism as central to Jewish identity. Other Jews (including me), though, believe that building Jewish identity on the erasure of other marginalized and colonized people is a betrayal of Jewish experience and the best of Jewish tradition. As a result, anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian solidarity have become central to the Jewish identity of many Jewish organizations and people on the left. To affirm what is valuable in Jewish life requires us to defend Palestinian life; Jewish liberation depends on Palestinian liberation. In diaspora, we cannot be free if our neighbors are not free.

The Founding and Whiteness

For Americans, there is a parallel between these Zionist/anti-Zionist arguments and historical U.S. debates about the nature of, and path towards, multi-racial democracy. Like Zionists in Israel, the U.S. Founders presented their new nation in broad terms as a novel exercise in self-determination, democracy, and justice. And like Zionists, the Founders’ new republic was, in crucial ways, not exactly a model of self-determination or democracy.

One story Americans often tell about the Founding is that, while the Constitution excluded Black people (and women, and native people, and poor people), those exclusions were a kind of inessential oversight. The Founders, this narrative goes, were subject to the bigotries of their own day, but they established universal principles which innately and inevitably expanded the range of liberty. In this view, Black people were always really part of the Constitutional agreement; it just took a while for that truth to be made manifest in reality.

There is another way of looking at the Constitution and its foundation of American identity, though. Philosopher Charles Mills has argued that the exclusion of Black people from democracy in the United States was not a historical accident, but a deliberate and foundational erasure.

“The United States has historically been, and in some ways continues to be, a racial polity, a political system predicated on nonwhite subordination,” he writes, and adds, “The three-fifths constitutional compromise can then be thought of as a literal quantitative representation of the reality of fractional personhood in a Herrenvolk [master race] polity.” For the Founders, white freedom, personhood, and dignity was based not on universal values, but on white supremacy and Black and Native exclusion. There was not “an abstract colorless norm from which people contingently fell short. Rather, there was an abstract norm that was generally realized, the norm of a more or less consistent racially structured ethic.”

That is the reason, Mills argues, that racism has been so intransigent—surviving the Civil War, the creation of the 14^th Amendment, the Civil Rights Movement, and the first Black president. It’s also why antiracism needs to be framed in specific terms. The supposedly universalist contract privileges white people and erases others; to contest that you have to say, not All Lives Matter, but Black Lives Matter, specifically. When a national identity is built on deliberately unacknowledged exclusions, equality requires particularist demands for recognition.

A Land without a People

Like the U.S. Founding, early Zionists framed their aspirations as a new birth of freedom and justice. Scholar Michael Stanislawski notes that Hungarian lawyer Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), often credited as the father of Zionism, believed that the creation of a Jewish state “would solve forever the problem of anti-Semitism,” ending bigotry and allowing for the unimpeded progress of European liberalism both in Israel (where European Jews would impose it) and in Europe (where it would no longer be derailed by bigotry against Jewish people, who would either emigrate or fully assimilate).

In line with this universalist argument, Herzl believed a Jewish state in Palestine would improve the conditions of Palestinian Arabs living under the Ottoman Empire. He assumed Palestinians would welcome Jewish rule—though in his diaries he also suggested that Israel should transport the poor Arab population across the border “while denying it any employment in our own country.”

Herzl’s bland assumption that he had the right and ability to speak for Palestinian people—and ship them where he would—was a kind of erasure. More explicit was the assertion of British Methodist minister Richard Watson in the early 19^th century that Palestine was the perfect place for a Jewish nation because, “There is a people without a country, and a country without a people.”

While this phrase seems to have originated with Christian Zionists, it was picked up by at least some Jewish Zionists. That included the Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901, which purchased land in Palestine for a future Jewish state using the slogan, “’the acquisition of the land without a people—for the people without a land.”

(Image source: Mappenstance/University of Richmond)

Palestinian scholar Edward Said, in The Question of Palestine, argues that the slogan doesn’t signify a belief that there are no Arabs living in Palestine, but instead is a kind of “wish…that the land be empty for development by a more deserving power.” In that vein, you could also see the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land,” and Golda Meir’s denial of the existence of a Palestinian people, as a statement that Israel is, in Mills’ sense, a racial polity. Certain people have rights and are part of the social contract. Others have no standing and function not as people, but as ghosts, or property, or impediments—or as a baseline of non-privilege which allows the privileged to more fully enjoy their status.

From the River to the Sea

Today, Zionists insist that “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism,” in the words of Jonathan Greenblatt, the current head of the ADL. And, as we’ve seen, Zionist identity is inextricable from Palestinian erasure. Transitively, then, Jewish identity depends on the elimination of Palestinian identity, which means that any assertion of Palestinian identity is viewed as an existential threat to Jewish people, as individuals and as a group.

You can see this calculus in the Zionist demonization of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The slogan refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Many Palestinians see the phrase as a demand for liberation for all—just as saying “Black Lives Matter” is a call for equality, not supremacy, for a group that has historically faced discrimination. Or as Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wrote, “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” This is consistent with the 1974 speech before the United Nations by PLO leader Yasser Arafat, in which he called for Israel to become, “one democratic State, where Christian, Jew, and Muslim live in justice, equality, and fraternity.”

Zionists, in contrast, insist that the phrase is equivalent to a “call for the genocide of the Jewish people in Israel,” in the words of Israel’s Minister of Defense Israel Katz. Katz and other Zionists argue that the slogan is a coded dog whistle; “from the river to the sea” they say, means that Palestinians want to eliminate all Jewish people in Israel. According to Zionists, Palestinians do not believe peaceful coexistence is possible, so when they call for freedom for themselves, they must be demanding the genocide of Jews.

Is it Palestinians who think Jewish people and Palestinians cannot live together, though? A 2024 survey in the U.S. found that 66% of Jewish students believed that “from the river to the sea” required the “expulsion and genocide of Israeli Jews”; only 14% of Muslim students believed that. A very large majority of Muslims do not appear to see Jewish freedom and Palestinian freedom as incompatible.

Anti-Zionist Jewish writer Peter Beinart points out that “there’s no way to prove who’s right” about the meaning of the phrase. But he also emphasizes that “even if [Palestinian] activists overwhelmingly endorsed Tlaib’s vision of a Palestine based on equality and peaceful coexistence,” Zionists would still see that vision as genocidal. That’s because “[f]or Jewish leaders in the United States and Israel, it’s axiomatic that without a Jewish state, Israeli Jews can’t be safe.” The only way that Jewish people globally can protect themselves from discrimination and racist violence is by controlling their own piece of ground.

Zionists are terrified that if Palestinians throughout Israel—including in the occupied territories—are granted full rights, including a right of return, Jews might not be a supermajority in Israel, and would not have absolute political power. Zionists don’t simply see this as a pragmatic question of safety though. They are not—or not only—arguing that Jewish people need a Jewish state to keep them secure. They are arguing that without Jewish rule in Israel—without Zionism anchoring Judaism—Jewish identity cannot exist. Absent Israel, Jews would no longer be a “people,” just as Meir said that Palestinians were not a people. This is why Zionism negates not just Palestinians, but Jews in the diaspora, who Zionists often claim are weakening or undermining true Jewishness—a true Judaism that can only exist in the Jewish nation-state.

Palestinian demands for equality and justice, therefore, are for Zionists innately genocidal, because, for Zionists, Jewish people only exist if they dominate and control Israel. Just as multi-racial democracy is an existential threat to white supremacy, so Palestinian equality is an existential threat to Zionism.

This means that a Jewish identity centered on Zionism is a Jewish identity predicated on Palestinian subjugation and erasure—a fact underlined by the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, which scholars have characterized as a genocide. The death toll has exceeded 75,000 people. Around 1.9 million people, or 90% of the population, have been displaced. Among many other explicit genocidal statements, Minister of Education Yoav Kisch said of Gazans, “Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated.”

Anti-Zionism and Pro-Palestinian Solidarity

For many Jewish people, the experience of persecution, resistance, and exile—from Egypt, to the Middle Ages, to Russia, to the Holocaust—is central to the Jewish experience. When Jews said “never again” after the Holocaust, many of us meant not just “never again will this happen to Jews” but “never again should this happen to anyone.” That history, and the view that Jewish persecution places Jews in solidarity with all persecuted people, is part of the reason that Jewish anti-Zionism is as old as Zionism itself.

In his sweeping study of the Jewish anti-Zionist left, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, Benjamin Balthaser, points out that among U.S. Jews, anti-Zionism was the majority stance in the 1930s and 40s. One Communist publication (which may well have been exaggerating) argued that only 1% of American Jews were Zionists in 1935.

The disinterest in Zionism was in part because Jews of the time were focused on identifying with America, not Israel. It was also because so many Jews were connected to a political left which viewed Zionism as imperialist, colonialist, and bourgeois, and as just the sort of oppressive ideology which had often targeted Jewish people in the past. Jewish leftists identified not with Zionist Jews in Israel, but with other oppressed people closer by, most notably African-Americans. For left Jews, Balthaser writes, “Solidarity with African-Americans against racism reinforced their own feelings of Jewishness.” Thus, the Communist, antifascist Civil Rights Congress in the 40s and 50s was mostly staffed by (non-Jewish) Black people and (white) Jewish people, and fought both against lynching in the South and against the execution of the Jewish Rosenbergs.

The movement of Jewish people—even Jewish socialists—into Zionism is a long, complicated story. But the anti-Zionist Jewish left tradition never disappeared. And as Zionism has become more powerful and more important to institutional Judaism, Jewish anti-Zionism has become more focused on solidarity with Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian movement. As Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American journalist and politician said, “Jewish people are consistently some of the greatest allies in the fight for Palestinian rights. Our futures and our faiths are so intertwined.”

The most obvious touchstone here is Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest American anti-Zionist organization with over 32,000 members. Formed in the 1990s, JVP has enthusiastically embraced the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), explicitly framing their support for an economic boycott as one of pro-Palestinian solidarity.

This solidarity is linked to Jewish diaspora identity—a powerful insistence that the core of Jewish identity is to not have a homeland, but to live in community with others. JVP’s homepage highlights the words, “Join us. You belong here.” That’s speaking to Jewish people who are looking for a home that is not Zionist Israel—whether that home is the U.S. itself or a political community on the left. But it’s also, arguably, speaking to Palestinians, and insisting that they should be able to have a home with Jewish people, in Israel and outside Israel. Jewish identity is predicated on experiences of diaspora and homelessness that parallel Palestinian experience. And to be true to that experience of Jewishness, Jewish people need to be in community and solidarity with the Palestinian people who have been displaced and persecuted in the name of Zionism.

This approach is not unique to JVP. An emphasis on Palestinian solidarity is the default for left Jewish anti-Zionist organizations today, including the publication Jewish Currents and the organizations Bend the Arc and If Not Now. If Not Now states as part of its core story, “Jews can never know true safety as long as Palestinians remain in danger. Jews cannot be free while Palestinians are not.” Zionists have built a Jewish identity on Palestinian erasure and absence; anti-Zionists have countered with a Jewish identity that tries to center Palestinian existence and Palestinian rights.

Diaspora Means You Are Your Neighbors

It may seem counterintuitive, or even perverse, to argue that the core of Jewish identity is in many ways located with people who are not Jews. And it’s true that trying to be for yourself and for others—or seeing that to be for yourself you must be for others—can be a contradictory faith to live by. Balthaser notes that JVP denounced the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, but has worked with Students for Justice in Palestine, which has supported the attacks.

Balthaser argues that this inconsistency is part of what it means to be a diasporic people—what he refers to as, “an inner core of Jewish identity and non-identity, the call to be both oneself and against oneself in any act of solidarity.” Zionism rejects that diasporic dislocation, demanding that Jewish people offer solidarity only to other (Zionist) Jews, and that they reject as weak or worthless the divided identity of diaspora. Zionists demand that Jews live on a land without others—or at least without others who matter.

But an ethno-nationalist vision of identity, in which one person’s existence is predicated on eliminating everyone else’s will not promote the flourishing of Jewish people, or Palestinians, or most anyone. If we cannot see ourselves in our neighbors, we will soon see ourselves nowhere. Or as French Palestinian poet Veera Sulaiman writes, referencing a Zapatista phrase, “We demand a world, with many worlds in it.”

Noah Berlatsky (he/him), author of The Revealer‘s “Skeptic’s Corner” column, is a freelance writer in Chicago. His poetry collection Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024) is about Jewish diaspora; his newsletter Everything Is Horrible is about politics, culture, and how everything is horrible.