The Exodus From Zionism

3rd May 2024

• Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism.

On Tuesday this week, members of the New York Jewish community held an event called ‘Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel’ at the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, just a block from the home of the American Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.

The Jewish Voice for Peace group organized the event, to call on Chuck Schumer and the United States Congress to end their complicity in Israel’s Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Many of the protestors were wearing t-shirts with the words:

NOT IN OUR NAME - JEWS SAY CEASE FIRE NOW

One of the speakers, Naomi Klein, a journalist, author and activist, gave a speech that rejects Zionism, and calls it out as a false idol, saying that it has misled the Jewish people, and is being used as a tool of colonialism, land theft, and genocide. At the end of her speech she said that Jewish people like herself, and the students protesting on university campuses around America today, reject the militarism of the Israeli ethno-state, and calls this rejection the Exodus from Zionism.

Zionism & Israel

Zionism is a political movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century, which aimed for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1897, the first World Zionism Congress was held by the World Zionism Organization. At this Congress they established their manifesto, which was called the Basel Program, which was guided by the statement:

“Zionism seeks to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law.”

At this time in history, in 1897, the land of Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the citizens there included Jewish people, Muslims, Christians, and others, all living peacefully together. I invite you to click through and read the Basel Program manifesto, because the first time I read it it struck me that it was a DECLARATION OF WAR on the Ottoman Empire, and the people of Palestine. It was someone else’s land, a part of someone else’s empire, and yet the World Zionism Organization set its sights on taking it. The main steps to the formation of the state that we know as Israel today were these.

1. 1897: The World Zionism Congress sets the Basel Program manifesto, and declares they want Palestine for a Jewish homeland.

2. 1917: The Balfour Declaration-a public statement by the British government during World War 1 that announces support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

3. 1914-1918: World War 1 results in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the British military occupy Palestine, and Jewish immigrants start flooding in.

4. 1922: At a private meeting of the Council of The League of Nations, (the first attempt at establishing what later became the United Nations), a small group, under the assumed right to make this decision, voted to give Britain a Mandate For Palestine, which required Britain to put the Balfour Declaration into effect, meaning to create a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Arab nationalists opposed this mandate, but were ignored.

5. In 1947 Britain referred the issue of Palestine to the newly formed United Nations. The United Nation’s General Assembly then voted to approve the United Nations Resolution 181, which created the U.N. Partition Plan for Israel and Palestine, and in 1948 the United Nations recognized Israel as a new nation.

In 1947 the United Nations vote that created Israel was approved by just 33 countries. There were 13 countries that voted against it, and there were 10 abstentions. The United Nations at that time had just 56 nations in its membership. Fifty six. Today there are 193 nations in the United Nations membership. So it took 33 nations, just 17% of the world’s countries, which voted to approve the creation of Israel. And it took 50 years from the declaration of the World Zionism Congress in 1897, until 1948, to achieve their objective, which was voted in by a tiny group of nations, which assumed they, and the League of Nations, had the right to do so.

Naomi Klein: The Exodus From Zionism

Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it, they are drunk on it, and they are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.

It is a false idol that takes our most profound Biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land, a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across faiths to every corner of this globe, and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militarist ethno-state.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.

From the start it has been at war with collective dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism has long equated Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship, un-freedom, and client state.

From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats, much as the Pharaoh in the book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the deaths of their sons. And as we know Moses was saved from that by being put in a basket, and adopted by an Egyptian woman.

Zionism has bought us to our present moment of cataclysm. And it is time we say clearly it has always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that has now been justifying the shredding of core commandments:

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shall not steal.

Thou shall not covet.

The commandments bought down from the mount.

It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value including the value that we place on questioning, a practice embedded in the Seder itself with its four questions asked by the youngest child.

It also betrays the love that we have as a people for text, and for education. Today this false idol dares to justify the bombing of every single university in Gaza, the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses, the killing of hundreds of academics, scholars, journalists, poets, essayists. This is what Palestinians call ‘scholasticide’ the killing of the infrastructure and the means of education.

Meanwhile in this city, (New York), the universities the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students asking them, students embodying the spirit of the Seder, asking the most basic questions. Asking questions like – How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in, and collaborate with this genocide.

The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long.

So tonight we say, it ends here.

Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethno-state. For our Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that ethno-state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews. Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations. Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in this chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation. Our Judaism is the Passover, is the Judaism of the Passover Seder. The gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike. This ritual, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but one another, even with we need no walls, we need no temples, no rabbis, and there is a role for everyone, including especially the smallest child.

The Seder is portable, a diaspora technology if ever there was one. It is made to hold our collective grieving, our contemplation, our questioning, our remembering, and our reviving and rekindling of the revolutionary spirit.

So, tonight, look around, this here is our Judaism. As waters rise, and forests burn, and nothing is certain we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost. We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. We want freedom from the ideology that has no plan for peace, except for deals with murderous theocratic petro-states next door, while selling the technologies of robot-assassinations to the world.

We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethno-state that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children afraid, that wants us to believe that the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress, or at least keep sending the weapons and donations.

That is a false idol. And it’s not just Netanyahu. It’s the world he made, and the world that made him, it’s Zionism.

What are we, we in these streets for months and  months, we are the Exodus, the Exodus from Zionism.

So to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say let our people go, we say we have already gone. And your kids, they’re with us now.