How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left
For decades, Joe Biden has proudly declared that he is a Zionist, and he has repeated that claim since Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel. But for the student anti-war protests gripping the US, the words “Zionist” and “Zionism” have become a watchword – pejorative and emblematic of the violent state policies driving the war on Gaza.
On social media and in the streets, critics no longer call out supporters of the state of Israel as “pro-Israel”: they call them Zionist. Some university encampments have posted signs saying: “Zionists not allowed.”
Student protesters say that their criticisms of Zionism are rooted in the state of Israel’s displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. ProIsrael activists have responded by defending the term. “If the last six months on campus have taught us anything, it is that a large and vocal population of the Columbia community does not understand the meaning of Zionism,” a group of more than 500 Columbia University students recently wrote. “We are proud to be Zionists.”
In the emotions stirred by the war, the late 19th-century ideology that underpins the state of Israel is getting as much attention as the state itself. But it doesn’t have a meaning that everyone agrees on.
The Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl launched the First Zionist Congress
in 1897. His project for a new homeland for Jews with self-rule came in reaction to the rampant, violent antisemitism in Europe and was shaped by political ideas of that time. He became committed to a Jewish state in Palestine, which he called “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”. Israel would be founded in 1948, several decades after his death.
Today, a generation of students emphasizes what they see as the settler-colonial nature of Herzl’s vision.
The shift in opinions on Zionismhas been particularly confusing for many Jewish Americans. Though 58% of Jewish Americans describe themselves as Zionist, according to a 2022 survey conducted by Carleton University political scientist Mira Sucharov, the term means vastly different things to different people. A majority see Zionism as signifying a connection to Israel (about 70%), and about just as many view it as a belief in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (72%), while a small minority describe it as “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel” (10%). Recent polling of Americans more broadly shows that many are unfamiliar with the term.
But for Palestinians, the notion that there’s a version of Zionism under which they can live in dignity is contradicted by history, because Zionism underpins the policies that drove their mass displacement from what became Israel in 1948 and has continued to displace them since. “When people think of Zionism now, they look at Gaza,” Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said. “This is what it means: that you want to have an ethnically exclusive state,” he said. “It’s ugly.”
Arguably for the first time, a Palestinian perspective on Zionism is taking center stage in mainstream discourse. “A lot more young people, including young Jews, are listening to their Palestinian friends and classmates who are saying: ‘This is what Zionism means to us,’” said Simone Zimmerman, the media director of Diaspora Alliance, an international organization focused on combating antisemitism and its weaponization. This explains how terms like “ethnostate”, “Jewish supremacy” and “settler-colonialism” have become central to the protests.
After the Holocaust, Zionism became a core tenet of American Jewish establishment organizations. American Jewry’s connections to Israel deepened especially after the 1967 and 1973 wars. In that era, Jewish Americans saw Israel as a bastion of liberal values, and the American Jewish community mustered immense philanthropic efforts in support of Israel. Most Jewish education programs, synagogues and community groups taught Zionism as basically inseparable from Judaism.
“I am a Zionist,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently wrote, “because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries.”
But there have always been Jewish communities that rejected Zionism – from secular communists to strands of Orthodox Jewry. Today, anti-Zionist Jewish students are more visible and have played an outsized role in the protests against Israel’s Gaza war.
The student tent city at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, for example, has been holding teach-ins on the history of Zionism, highlighting narratives that many of the Jewish students participating in the encampment had not gotten in their own formal Jewish education.
They echo grassroots organizations that have been embracing the moniker of anti-Zionism to, as they put
it, reclaim Judaism from its association with Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace has been a force behind protests that delayed Biden’s State of the Union address in March and interrupted his recent appearances in Manhattan. Jay Saper, an organizer with JVP, pointed out that the movement is also building “an anti-Zionist Jewish community, a Jewish community beyond Zionism”.
These views still represent a relatively small proportion of US public opinion, but the protesters have forced a new conversation about Jewish Americans’ relationship to Israel.
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Israel’s enduring occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has also shifted the conversation on the left, which increasingly views Zionism itself as being essential to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the war on Gaza as a logical conclusion of Zionism.
The partition of land into two states – Israel and Palestine – was once consensus, viewed as a way to preserve a Jewish state that would not indefinitely rule over the Palestinians. But two decades of land-for-peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization collapsed under the Obama administration and have never been restarted.
The failure of the peace process to produce an independent Palestinian state, alongside perpetually expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, became proof for many observers that subsequent Israeli governments were never serious about those negotiations.
Israelis and Palestinians, especially those younger than 35, are less likely to support two states. A majority of Middle East scholars, according to a 2023 poll, don’t think a Palestinian state is possible.
The breakdown of a process toward a Palestinian state has also come as Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented what they have found to be increasingly repressive apartheid policies in the occupied territories, which challenge the very notion that Israel is a democracy.
Though only a small portion of
Jewish Americans see Zionism as “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel”, Palestinians, including citizens of Israel, live a very different reality. This has put liberal Zionists in America in a tenuous position. Under ever more extreme right-wing Israeli governments, the long-simmering tensions between a Jewish and a democratic state have come to a boiling point. “The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades – a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews – has failed,” Peter Beinart wrote in 2020. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.”
Beinart now describes himself as a cultural Zionist, drawing upon debates in the 1940s that held out the possibility of a binational state that also supported a growth of Jewish and Hebrew culture in Mandatory Palestine. But a version of Zionism in practice that doesn’t favor Jewish interests has yet to materialize, and it’s not clear what it would look like.
Can Israel be separated from Zionism? “In principle, nobody has an objection to the Jewish people having a state,” Makdisi, of UCLA, said. “The problem is, where do they choose to have this state? And under what circumstances, and who is being asked to pay the price for it?”
“Jewish people don’t have a right that overrides the Palestinian people’s rights,” he continued.
The rhetoric common on the left today is also perhaps part of a more maximalist shift toward Palestinian liberation. Language of “resistance” has figured prominently in the antiwar protests, in contrast to an earlier emphasis on the co-existence of Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
Many of the protesters believe that a binational state with equal rights for Palestinians is the only way forward. “People have come to the conclusion that reform has not worked and radical action is the solution to make change for a just and peaceful world,” Allie Ryave, a Harvard Law School student protesting in the university’s encampment, said.
Many American Jews feel under attack by the attention on Zionism right now. They may identify with a range of paradigms – secular Zionism, religious Zionism, labor Zionism, liberal Zionism or other forms of Jewish nationalism – now collapsed into a single derisive word.
But Palestinian scholars say the Zionism that the protest movement has put at the center is simply the state of Israel’s overt ideology, which asserts the dominance of Jews over the land. “Zionism as practiced is not an abstraction,” Makdisi said. “It happened in the land of Palestine. It happened at the expense – and it’s happening at the expense – of the Palestinian people.”
At Harvard University’s protest encampment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sophomore Violet Barron said that she defers to her Palestinian classmates and peers in thinking through these complex issues. “It took watching the scale of devastation in Gaza to understand what a staunch belief in Zionism can justify,” she said.
cares about you, but we do.’”
Lux said many blue-collar voters were unhappy that presidents Clinton and Obama pushed the idea that everybody should go to college. “A feeling started to develop that workingclass people weren’t as welcome in the Democratic party,” Lux said.
In his eyes, the 2007-2009 recession, largely caused by Wall Street, has also been a big problem for Democrats. “There was a feeling that Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street and did not do much to bail out regular workers,” Lux said. “That was a huge moment. It led to folks giving the finger to the establishment, and that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.”
Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and co-author of the book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, agreed with Lux. “Working-class people were counting on them [the Democrats]. They were the party that was on the side of the working class, and they felt betrayed.”
Teixeira said the free trade initiatives “showed that the Democrats were not worrying about deindustrialization, not worrying about what’s happened to the median voter in the middle of the country. The Democrats were increasingly responsive to Wall Street. So some folks decided to give the Republicans a try.”
Taking a position that has angered many progressives, Teixeira said the Democrats’ stance on “crime, race, gender and climate is a whole can of worms” that has turned off many blue-collar voters. He said the Democrats are obsessed with climate change in a way that alienates many bluecollar voters, who, he said, fear that the push for renewable energy will mean higher energy prices. Teixeira also said that Democratic concerns about transgender rights – a culture war focus of the Republicans – has turned off many blue-collar voters.
“The Democrats have to orient themselves away from the median liberal, college- educated voter who they get a Soviet-style majority from and orient themselves toward the median working-class voter, not just white, but non-white voters,” Teixeira said. “It’s not easy to do. They have to turn the battleship around.”
Another reason blue-collar voters have turned away from Democrats is the decline in union membership – from 35% of all workers in the 1950s to 10% today. Rosenthal remembers going to a steelworkers’ union hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, several decades ago – it had 15 bowling lanes and a bar. “Around 30% of workers were in unions,” Rosenthal said. “Another 10% or 15% were in union households, and a lot of other workers drank at the bar or bowled there.” The steelworkers’ hall served as a community center where people received information from the union and there was robust support for Democrats. The new book Rust Belt Union Blues describes a transformed landscape where many union halls have closed and gun clubs have often replaced them as gathering places for the working class – and there, the ambience is pro-Trump.
Another factor contributing to the Democrats’ woes is that over half the nation’s local news stations are in the hands of Sinclair and other rightwing owners, said Lux. That often makes it harder for Biden and other Democrats to get their message across.
As a result, Lux said, Democrats have to work extra hard to get their message out – for instance, through community Facebook pages that explain that the new bridge in town is being built thanks to Biden or that the Biden administration has helped bluecollar Americans by extending overtime coverage to 4 million more workers and banning non-competes that cover 30 million workers.
“The Democrats have to lean into issues that mean a lot to working people,” Lux said. “We have to keep showing up in Ottumwa [a workingclass town in Iowa] and keep showing up in Youngstown [a blue-collar Ohio town].”
The Biden administration often seems to communicate its economic agenda in dribs and drabs. One day it blocks two giant grocery chains from merging, saying the merger could push grocery prices higher. Another day it caps banks’ junk fees, and yet another day it boasts about the low unemployment rate.
Lake says the administration is going about this the wrong way. “They tend to start the message with their accomplishments,” she said. “They need to start the message with the overall narrative and then go to their accomplishments.”
Lake said Biden’s economic message wasn’t getting across effectively. “They need more repetition,” she said. “They need more volume. It’s really difficult to break through.”
Several political analysts said love it or hate it, Donald Trump – unlike Biden – has an unmistakable narrative: Make America great again. Too many immigrants are crossing the border. The elite and deep state are out to get you.
“In a war between good policies and good stories that speak to people’s identities and emotions, good stories are going to win,” said Deepak Bhargava, president of the JPB Foundation and former head of the Center for Community Change.
Gaspard said Biden had a good economic story to tell and agreed that he wasn’t telling it very effectively. “He needs to talk more and more about growing the economy by building out the middle class,” Gaspard said. “Talking about the amount of dollars going to a big social program does nothing to sway voters. You need to talk about how Donna is going to be able to afford insulin and Josh is going to be able to afford to send kids to daycare. Things that are relatable to people.”
He said it was important to point to villains and draw contrasts with the other side: “You need to say Trump will cut taxes on the wealthy and that will hurt the working class. You need to ramp up efforts to say Trump will raise prices and hurt working families with his 10% across-the-board tariffs. That will mean a $1,500 tax that’s passed on to all working families.That’s massive, and it makes it painstakingly clear that Trump isn’t concerned about workers.”
Gaspard said that in his economic messaging, Biden needed to “recognize the insecurities that working folks – white, Black and brown – are feeling” whether about the cost of living or other matters. “Biden needs to call out General Mills and Kimberly-Clark for raising the price of cereal and diapers,” Gaspard said. “People like it when you’re fighting for them.”
Amid all the talk about wooing blue-collar voters, Lake said young voters were too often forgotten. She urged Biden to address their concerns. “They’re very hard-pressed economically,” she said. “We haven’t been talking enough about issues facing young voters. It’s not just student loans. They’re worried about how much jobs pay and for many of them, it’s impossible to buy a house.”
With his blue-collar support soft, Biden is looking to labor unions to help put him over the top in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for Biden, his lead over Trump in union households has slipped: from 56% to 40% in 2020 exit polls to 50% to 41% early this year, according to an NBC News Poll.
Rosenthal, who like Podhorzer used to be the AFL-CIO’s political director, said it was vital for unions to step up – and soon – emphasizing that they can make the crucial difference in battleground states where the victory margin can be just a few thousand votes. Rosenthal said the labor movement had a huge amount at stake, considering that Biden has been the most prounion in memory – he has invited union organizers to the White House and appointed many pro-union officials to the National Labor Relations Board.
“If Biden loses, and if he loses because he didn’t win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and if he doesn’t win those states because the union household vote isn’t where it should be, there will never be another Democratic candidate who will give a shit about the union movement,” Rosenthal said. “Why should they, if he can’t win in those critical states? There is way more at stake for the labor movement in this election than for the rest of the country.”
Two of Akein’s siblings had witnessed Allen brutalize him, and they told two of their older brothers who lived across town. Craig Scott, 18, and Michael Scott, 20, immediately raced over to the scene of the beating, traded angry words with Allen, shot him in the head and killed him.
The Scotts ended up with life sentences at Louisiana’s notorious state penitentiary, colloquially known as Angola. Akein and the rest of Gladys Scott’s children were dispersed among various other family members.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Akein carried the scars of the beating at the shooting he acknowledged carrying out on Sunday, 12 May 2013, at a secondline parade honoring Mother’s Day. In an internationally broadcast surveillance camera image that depicted him using his right hand to fire a gun into a crowd as the parade passed through the city’s seventh ward neighborhood, the then 19-year-old’s outstretched left forearm is bent in an unnatural angle.
“That twist was because baby Akein’s broken left arm had never healed properly after he left the hospital, and the family lacked the money to get the problem corrected,” Hertsgaard wrote in Big Red’s Mercy, which Pegasus Publishers released on 7 May.
Eventually, Akein and Shawn pleaded guilty to their roles in the
Mother’s Day shooting, which they said targeted a particular rival and was meant to raise the profile of a heroindealing gang led by another of their brothers.
Beside Akein’s life term, which at age 30 he is serving at a federal prison in Texas, Shawn received 40 years in prison. Shawn Scott is being housed at a federal prison in central Louisiana, and the 35-year-old is scheduled to get out in June 2047.
The Scotts didn’t only victimize strangers, said Hertsgaard, who was visiting from out of town and befriended Cotton after they were both struck in a mass shooting that drew headlines across most of the Englishspeaking world.
Without realizing, the Scotts also injured their own nephew, 10 at the time, in what was the second time the boy had been shot during his brief life, as Hertsgaard noted in one of the many almost incomprehensible circumstances documented in his book.
Hertsgaard’s book takes pains to portray those facts as a collective failure of the environment which produced the Scotts – not just something personal to them. It links their fate to the city’s history of once being the US’s largest slave market – and the country’s inability to either confront or reconcile with that past, according to Hertsgaard and Cotton.
To Hertsgaard, one of the federal law enforcement agents who investigated the Mother’s Day shooting – and, coincidentally, grew up on the grounds of Louisiana’s Angola prison – perhaps put it best when informed of the life-altering beating Akein endured so early in his childhood.
“When you dig deep into someone like … Akein Scott, and you see how they grew up, you kind of get it how they came out the way they did,” Joe Frank of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said to Hertsgaard. “If you grow up around violence from the time you first walk and talk, what are you going to do when you’re grown up?”