As a writer, the misuse of words regarding the occupation and genocide in Gaza concerns me. Merriam-Webster defines Zionism as “an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine” — a quite modern political ideology which doesn’t require being Jewish. Judaism’s definition mentions nothing of Israel or Zionism. It is a diverse, ancient religion.
But a religious ethnostate requires apartheid, or “apart-hood.” Apartheid, a crime against humanity as per the UN and ICJ, is a legal system that institutionalizes and enforces core human rights based on ethnicity.
The claim that Israel doesn’t exemplify apartheid is bone-chillingly Orwellian. Israel’s human hierarchy is explicit in its color-coded identity cards that dictate which rights one is allowed, based on ethnicity. Palestinians are disallowed proper citizenship, and core rights of travel, re-entry, property, and representation. B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, African National Congress, and other experts agree.
Ethnostates require apartheid and generally involve ethnic cleansing. Whether Nazi Germany’s oppression of Jews, unspeakable violences against Native Americans and Black people, or Myanmar’s dictatorship — where I worked as a writing teacher with Indigenous activists — one won’t find good faith examples otherwise. That’s because democracy is antithetical to a state which prioritizes one group. Full stop.
That Zionism requires apartheid is one of the more straightforward facts of this “debate.” More complex is whether one justifies, distracts from, or “whatabouts” certain apartheids and genocides based on who is enacting them. For those who disagree, I urge a review of one’s sources of information and cultural intake. Does it include voices of Palestinians and non-Zionist Jews, basic definitions of democracy, and diverse non-Zionist experts on trauma, bias, and oppression? Religion is not history, nor is it law. There’s a reason the ICJ, UN General Assembly, and UN Security Council regard Israel as the occupier.
The history of Zionist occupation and genocide did not start with Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. To paraphrase Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti: To dispossess a people, simply start their story with “secondly.” Start with the response to the dispossession, and not the dispossession itself.
Carolyn Zaikowski, Easthampton poet laureate
Southampton