What Zionism is

What it is

Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish homeland, the land historically called the Land of Israel or Palestine. It has a founding date and a founding document. In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, published a pamphlet called Der Judenstaat, arguing that Jewish assimilation into European society had failed and that antisemitism made a Jewish state the only durable answer. He wasn't even fixed on Palestine at first; he floated Argentina and a British offer of land in East Africa before settling on the historic homeland. ²

A year later, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, drawing roughly 200 delegates. The Congress adopted the Basel Program, which stated the movement's goal plainly: to establish "a legally assured home for the Jewish people in Palestine." ² That single sentence is the closest thing Zionism has to an original charter.

Britain gave the movement its first major diplomatic win two decades later. The 1917 Balfour Declaration announced British support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," and Britain administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1922 until 1948. ^{1 4}

Zionism was never one idea, though. Herzl's approach, political Zionism, treated statehood and international recognition as the goal, achieved through diplomacy. A rival current, associated with the writer Ahad Ha'am (the pen name of Asher Ginsberg), argued the opposite emphasis: that a Jewish state built without a prior revival of Hebrew language and Jewish culture would be a state of Jews, not a Jewish state, and that spiritual and cultural renewal needed to come first. Ahad Ha'am worried Herzl's diplomacy-first approach risked disillusionment if it didn't rest on genuine national consciousness. ³ Religious Zionism and labor Zionism developed as further, distinct strands within the same broader movement, one rooting the return to the land in religious meaning, the other organizing it around socialist and cooperative labor movements that built the kibbutz system. ⁴ These currents argued with each other constantly. They still do, inside Israel, over what kind of state the country is supposed to be.

What it is not

Zionism is not a single political platform, and it is not the same thing as support for any particular Israeli government or its policies. People who call themselves Zionists disagree, often sharply, about settlements, about the war in Gaza, about religion and state, and about nearly everything else in Israeli politics. Being a Zionist means believing the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their homeland; it does not require agreement on how that state should govern itself, and it is possible to be a committed Zionist and a committed critic of a sitting Israeli government at the same time.

How the word gets used, and misused, today

Anti-Zionism, opposition to the idea of a Jewish state, and antisemitism, hostility to Jews as Jews, are related debates but not the same debate, and serious people disagree about exactly where they overlap. Two competing frameworks show the range of that disagreement.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted its Working Definition of Antisemitism on May 26, 2016. The core definition is short: "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews." ⁵ It comes with eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate to Israel, including "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" by claiming Israel's existence is "a racist endeavour," applying "double standards" to Israel not applied to other democracies, and drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and Nazism. It also explicitly states that "criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." ⁵ The UK adopted it in 2016, and Israel followed in 2017; more recent counts put adoption at roughly 31 countries, plus the European Union and other bodies. ⁵

The definition has also drawn criticism, including from Kenneth Stern, one of the people who helped draft it, who has argued against using it to police speech on college campuses. Critics say weighting seven of eleven examples toward Israel risks treating criticism of Israeli policy as inherently suspect. ⁶ That criticism led a group of scholars to write an alternative. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism launched on March 25, 2021, under the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, with 210 initial signatories, since grown past 400. ⁶ Its core definition: antisemitism is "discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)." ⁶ Rather than list examples weighted toward Israel, it offers fifteen guidelines meant to separate antisemitic from non-antisemitic speech about Israel and Palestine, stating explicitly that criticizing Israeli policy, supporting Palestinian rights, opposing Zionism as a political program, comparing Israel to historical cases including apartheid, and supporting boycotts are "not antisemitic" on their own, when evidence-based and not applied with a double standard. ⁶

Neither document is official law anywhere; both function as reference points that governments, universities, and organizations choose to adopt or not. Both agree antisemitism and criticism of Israel are not the same thing. Where they split is how much space exists between opposing Zionism and crossing into antisemitism, and who gets to say where that line falls in a given case. ^{5 6}