Zionism is racism. Just ask Israel’s politicians

The history of Zionism explains what just happened in Israel’s elections

Israel’s elections have exposed something far more significant than the political fate of Benjamin Netanyahu. They raise a fundamental question about the ideology on which the Israeli state is founded: Zionism.

If this was another country, the story of the elections would be straightforward,

After all, the opposition parties won 67 seats, compared to 53 seats for the government bloc led by Benjamin Netanyahu. A coalition would surely be formed between the Jewish-led and Palestinian-led parties.

Such a government would be presented as evidence of the country’s flourishing multi-ethnic democracy.

Not so in Israel.

Palestinians make up a fifth of Israel’s citizenry, yet their political representatives are deemed politically illegitimate by both the government and much of the opposition.

Meanwhile, both the government and opposition support the genocide as well as the illegal occupation and colonisation of the West Bank.

Earlier this month, the Green Party of England and Wales was on the receiving end of a political firestorm after adopting a motion declaring Zionism to be racism. Its critics treated the proposition as self-evidently outrageous.

As hostility to Israel has exploded across the West because of the livestreamed genocide, many of the state’s defenders have pivoted to portraying Netanyahu as the problem. In this narrative, Israel is just another Western democracy infected with right-wing populism – like the US and so many European countries.

All of this is based on fantasies and lies. That becomes obvious as we examine the origins of Zionism, the statements of its founders, the role of British colonial power, the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948, and the racist subjugation that followed.

As we’ll see, the racism on display in Israel’s elections is no aberration. It is the contemporary expression of a political project whose central aim was always to establish, preserve and expand a Jewish state in a land already inhabited by another people.

Netanyahu isn’t the problem

The election campaign of Netanyahu and his allies was unquestionably focused on whipping up fear and hatred about the political participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Posters put up by Likud - his party - were emblazoned with ‘Either the right, or Palestine’. Israeli voters received emergency text message alerts warning: “Last chance to prevent a left-wing Arab government. Go out and vote.”

Netanyahu claimed “Muslim Brotherhood supporters are raiding the polling stations and stealing the elections.” He posted a photograph dating from February 2026 of veil-wearing Muslim women going to pray in Jerusalem, with the caption: “This is what’s happening today in Rahat. You must not stay at home. Get out urgently to vote Machal. We’re in a war for the home!”

After the election, Likud declared: “The elections in Israel were stolen by Arab parties”. The party backed this up with baseless claims of foreign funding from Qatar and Turkey using terrorist channels.

But it is a major mistake - and deceit - to portray this anti-Palestinian racism as specific to the Netanyahu bloc.

Last September, Yair Lapid - a supposed ‘centrist’ opposition leader - declared:

“There will be no government with the Arabs again after October 7. The public is not ready for a government that depends on Arab votes.”

There were no pretences here. The Palestinians who make up a fifth of Israeli society – many of them descendants of Palestinians who remained in their homeland after the murderous mass expulsion of the 1948 Nakba – were demonised. They were treated as politically illegitimate on the basis of their ethnicity.

Then there’s Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister whose ‘Together’ alliance with Yair Lapid came third in the elections, behind Likud and Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party. Here is a man who has previously been rightly described as ‘far-right’ by Western media organisations, but is now presented as a moderate alternative to Netanyahu.

Earlier this year, he declared:

“We will rely only on Zionist parties. The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.”

Bear in mind that Zionism means support for a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population who once made up the overwhelming majority of Palestine.

Listen to what other opposition leaders have said. Avigdor Lieberman - another far-right opposition leader - ruled out any government relying on Arab parties “either directly or indirectly”, declaring that the only acceptable coalition would be exclusively Zionist.

He had explained last year that excluding these parties reflected the “basic values of the Zionist movement”.

It is worth considering how far one Palestinian-led party has gone to appease these people. Ra’am is a conservative Muslim party focused on transactional politics. It recruited Yoav Segalovitz – a Jewish Zionist politician, former IDF officer and Israeli police commander – and made him number two on its list. It has repeatedly acknowledged Israel as a Jewish state and condemned Hamas.

Yet it is still regarded as beyond the pale.

Indeed, both Israel’s governing and opposition parties are not just racist: they are defined by genocidal racism.

“Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy,” the newly elected Moshe Feiglin once declared. In this election, he allied with the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich - an alliance welcomed by Netanyahu himself.

And what of opposition leader Avigdor Lieberman? In November 2023, he declared: “There are no innocents in Gaza.”

It wasn’t the first time he had made such a statement. In 2018, he told Israel’s public radio: “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.”

In what other country on earth can you find such loud-and-proud genocidal racism not just in government, but shared by the opposition, too?

‘Zionism is racism’

To understand why, we have to understand the history of Zionism as an explicitly colonial movement.

Back in 1897, the Zionist movement adopted its founding Basel Programme. It explicitly called for the “colonisation of Palestine” by Jewish workers.

The founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was explicit about its racist character. He envisaged a future Jewish state in Palestine as “a rampart of Europe against Asia,” and an “outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”, he declared.

In other words, the thinking was entirely in keeping with the European colonial projects of the time.

At the time, about 92% of Palestine’s population was Arab Muslim or Christian. Herzl left no doubt that he wanted them gone. In an 1895 diary entry outlining how a prospective Jewish state might be established, he proposed to “spirit the penniless population across the border” by securing employment for them elsewhere whilst denying them any employment in the planned Jewish territory. In other words: to remove them through economic pressure.

Max Nordau - a co-founder of the Zionist Organisation along with Herzl - declared that Jews who went to Palestine would remain Europeans and referred to Asian “anthropological and cultural inferiority.” At the Eighth Zionist Congress he openly compared Jewish settlements with Europeans settling among indigenous populations elsewhere.

Another leading Zionist figure and associate of Herzl, Joseph Klausner, described the Arabs as being at the “cultural level of semi-savages.” He envisaged Jews becoming “masters of the country” through their supposed cultural superiority.

Zionist colonists like Ze’ev Smilansky, a Zionist journalist and statistician who died in 1944, warned of Jewish children acquiring the “hideous vices and gesticulations of the semi-savage Arabs”.

Zionist philosophy pushed the idea of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But the early Zionists knew this was a lie.

Ahad Ha’am, the founder of cultural Zionism, said:

“From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But in truth it is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled…”

He was candid about Zionist attitudes towards the existing inhabitants, too. “From abroad, we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them,” he wrote. Instead they were clever and cunning, he argued.

Then there was Moshe Smilansky, a Zionist leader associated with efforts to improve relations between Jews and the Arab population. “We must not forget that we are dealing here with a semi-savage people,” he said, “which has extremely primitive concepts.”

Meanwhile, Palestinians who lived there knew where this was all heading. “They will acquire farm after farm,” warned Najib Nassar, the Palestinian Christian editor of the newspaper al-Karmal in 1914, “and drive the inhabitants from them and replace them with Zionist immigrants.”

The Balfour Declaration

In 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour famously issued his statement:

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Notably, any mention of political or national rights for the Palestinian population was absent.

A people scattered around the world was accorded a national claim to Palestine by the pre-eminent imperial power of the time. Those who represented the overwhelming majority of the population of Palestine were promised individual rights, but not any equivalent national sovereignty.

Indeed, two years later, Balfour wrote more candidly about British intentions. He told his colleague Lord Curzon: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country”.

He added:

“The four Great Powers are committed to zionism. And zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

Notably, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, was the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet at the time. He was passionately against the Zionist project.

His warning was prescient. He asked what a “national home of the Jewish people” meant:

“I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference.”

He warned, too, that other countries would seek to “get rid of its Jewish citizens”, and that the new arrivals would mean “a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants.”

Strikingly, the presidents of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association issued a statement warning that the proposals would give Jewish settlers “special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population.”

Across the Atlantic, similar prophetic warnings were shared. A petition to US President Woodrow Wilson was signed by prominent Jewish Americans including Henry Morgenthau Sr, the former US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs and Congressman Julius Kahn.

Its authors warned that the Zionist project would jeopardise the rights of Jews elsewhere, while rejecting Zionist assurances that non-Jews in Palestine would be treated fairly under “Jewish dominance”. “The keynotes of democracy are neither condescension nor tolerance, but justice and equality,” they declared.

Instead, they called for an independent, democratic Palestine, with equal rights for all regardless of their religion or ethnicity - transforming what had once been a promised land for Jews into a “land of promise” for everyone. They supported providing refuge in Palestine for Jews fleeing persecution - but opposed establishing a state which privileged one people over others.

The champions of the Zionist movement more than confirmed these fears.

The Zionist leadership’s contempt for political equality was barely disguised. In May 1918, Chaim Weizmann – later Israel’s first president – complained that British administrators were allowing Palestinian Arabs influence commensurate with their numbers. “The brutal numbers operate against us,” a Zionist Commission report protested, because there were five Arabs for every Jew. The report objected to treating Jews politically as equivalent to the indigenous population, insisting there was a “fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab”. It also resented the continued employment of Arab and Syrian officials.

In 1919, a US Commission established by President Wilson to examine the future of the former Ottoman Empire reported its findings.

The commissioners wrote that they had initially been in favour of Zionism - but their experience with the facts on the ground in Palestine changed their mind. Citing the promises of the Balfour Declaration, they concluded that the creation of a Jewish state could not “be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.”

They went on:

“The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.”

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, was equally explicit. “There can be no voluntary agreement” with the Palestinian Arabs, he declared in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall. They would never willingly consent to transforming Palestine from “an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority”, he argued. Indeed, Jabotinsky based his prediction on historic precedent, asking his readers to identify a single historical example of colonisation which took place with the consent of the indigenous population.

“There is no such precedent,” he declared. Native peoples had “always stubbornly resisted the colonists”. Was this an argument for ending Zionist colonisation? Far from it. Instead, he was urging it to proceed regardless of Palestinian opposition, protected by an “iron wall” that the indigenous population could not breach.

The British Mandate

After the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I, Palestine came under British control.

In 1922, the League of Nations offered legitimacy to the occupation, embedding obligations to advance a new national home for Jews - with no such commitment for the Palestinian Arabs who made up 90% of the population.

Zionist institutions - initially the Zionist Organisation, designated as the recognised Jewish agency under the 1922 Mandate, and from 1930 the enlarged Jewish Agency for Palestine - received official recognition. There was no such recognition of equivalent Palestinian Arab institutions.

Mass Jewish immigration to Palestine was facilitated to create a new Jewish homeland. Land purchases by Zionist organisations - not least from absentee landlords - deprived Palestinian tenant farmers of land that their families had cultivated for generations.

Meanwhile, the Labor Zionist movement promoted the “conquest of labour” - that is, to replace Palestinian Arab workers with Jewish workers.

The consequences were so severe that even the British occupiers couldn’t ignore them. A British-commissioned investigation led by Sir John Hope Simpson found that Zionist land purchases were causing mass Arab landlessness. The report condemned the “persistent and deliberate boycott of Arab labour” as a violation of Britain’s obligations under the Mandate, and warned of the expansion of “an enclave in Palestine from which all Arabs were excluded.” He further noted that Palestinian peasants were being crippled by rising rents, extortionate taxation and huge debts, but received none of the financial and institutional support enjoyed by Jewish settlers.

Such injustice made Palestinian resistance inevitable - and it was brutally crushed, not least in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt. Many of the tactics today employed by Israel were developed by the British. They subjected the Palestinians to mass arrests, detention camps, torture - and executions. Collective punishment was routine - from the demolition of homes and entire residential blocks to collective fines, curfews and punitive occupations of villages. Palestinian civilians were used as human shields.

Meanwhile, the British recruited, trained and armed Zionist organisations to help suppress the Palestinian population.

Zionist leaders were clear about their intentions. David Ben-Gurion - later Israeli prime minister - told a Jewish Agency meeting in June 1938: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

Menachem Ussishkin was the leader of the Jewish National Fund, which had been founded to buy up Palestine’s land for Zionist settlers. At the same Jewish Agency meeting, he proposed transferring around 60,000 Arab families, arguing:

We cannot start the Jewish state with … half the population being Arab . . . Such a state cannot survive even half an hour. It [i.e., transfer] is the most moral thing to do ... I am ready to come and defend … it before the Almighty …

Then there was Joseph Weitz, a key director of the Jewish National Fund. Despite his central role in buying up land, Weitz concluded that this alone would not create a Jewish state. “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country,” he wrote in December 1940. “If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide-open for us,” he added. “And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.” He was firm in his conclusion: “There is no room for compromise on this point!” Arabs, he declared, must be transferred to neighbouring countries: “Except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe.”

Zionist militias began launching terrorist attacks against Palestinian Arab civilians - not least the Irgun, whose eventual leader Menachem Begin became prime minister of Israel. On 26 July 1938, a bombing at Haifa’s vegetable market killed 53 people. Across three bombings at the market between July 1938 and June 1939, 92 people were killed in total. Zionist militants carried out many other lethal anti-Arab terrorist attacks, including bombings and shootings.

But there is a common argument about this period. Weren’t many of the Jewish settlers refugees fleeing persecution?

Indeed, tens of thousands of German Jews fleeing the Nazis settled in Palestine. The United States and Britain also admitted substantial numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and annexed Austria, but restrictive immigration policies excluded many others. If they had stayed in Germany, most would undoubtedly have been murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, anti-Zionist Polish Bundist Jews who had survived the Holocaust faced antisemitic pogroms at home. Some sought opportunities to emigrate outside Palestine, but restrictive immigration policies severely limited the choices available to many Jewish survivors.

All of this underlines the criminal role of the British and American authorities at the time. They should have opened their arms to Jewish refugees. The point is that - from a Palestinian perspective - the background of the arrivals did not alter their lived experience. They were still being forced from their homes and land - and it was not the Palestinian Arabs guilty of persecuting Jews in Europe.

The Nakba and what came next

Today, it has become fashionable to portray Israel’s ills as being caused by right-wing capture.

But this is to erase a central historical fact. Who were the architects of the Nakba - that is - the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 - and of the system of apartheid, the occupation and indeed the illegal settlements?

It was the Zionist left. The Zionist right did not become dominant in Israel until the 1970s.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine. Despite mass Jewish immigration, Palestinian Arabs still constituted about 67% of the population. But 56% of the land was allocated to the proposed Jewish state, and about half of its population would be Palestinian Arab. While the Zionist leadership accepted the proposal, Palestinian Arabs unsurprisingly rejected it. They were being asked to give up most of a land where they had - until recently - represented the overwhelming majority.

During the Nakba that followed, Zionists perpetrated massacres of Palestinian civilians, such as at Deir Yassin, where around 100–110 people were killed, including many civilians, among them women and children.

According to the testimony of one Israeli soldier, soldiers in a village near Hebron killed children by smashing their heads with sticks, two elderly women were placed in a home which was blown up, and a soldier boasted of raping a woman before shooting her.

750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, with an estimated 13,000–15,000 Palestinians killed during the war, most of them civilians. Entire villages were erased.

Jews all over the world were granted the right to gain Israeli citizenship. The Palestinians who had been driven from their homes, on the other hand, were refused the right to return to their land. This one Zionist principle embodies the racism of the entire philosophy.

What then happened to the minority of Palestinians who remained?

Many of them had their homes, land and property confiscated. The 1950 Absentees’ Property Law enabled the state to seize property belonging to Palestinian refugees – including people displaced within the territory of Israel itself. Those displaced within Israel were classified as present absentees, with no automatic right to reclaim their homes or land.

Until 1966, the Palestinians remaining in Israel lived under military rule, subject to curfews, surveillance, severe restrictions on movement and political repression. They faced systemic discrimination in public employment, housing and resource allocation.

They suffered hideous violence, including in October 1956, when Palestinian civilians returning to their village from work were unaware of a curfew. Forty-eight were killed, including women and children.

As military rule over Palestinians in Israel drew to an end, the Israeli government privately linked opening certain closed areas with “demolition of structures in abandoned villages, forestation, declaration of nature reserves, fencing and guarding”. The fear was that displaced Palestinians might otherwise return to the villages from which they had been driven.

From 1967 onwards, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, subjecting what was then a million more Palestinians to Israeli rule without citizenship or rights. Around 300,000 were driven from their land. Those who remained were subjected to severe repression, while the illegal settlement of their land began almost immediately.

In today’s West Bank, Israeli settlers enjoy the protection of Israeli civilian law, while Palestinian residents are subject to military orders and military courts. Their land is increasingly seized for illegal Israeli settlements, and their freedom of movement is throttled by checkpoints, roadblocks and barriers. Their homes are demolished. They are subjected to forced displacement, military raids, mass incarceration without trial, and ever-escalating lethal violence from Israeli settlers and the Israeli army, both working in tandem.

This is apartheid, as concluded by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Indeed, in 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that the system represented systemic discrimination based on race, religion or ethnic origin.

In Israel itself, the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law imposes sweeping restrictions on granting citizenship or residence to Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza - including spouses of Israeli citizens, who in practice are almost exclusively Palestinian.

As so-called ‘centrist’ Israeli politician Yair Lapid put it, this legislation was “one of the tools designed to ensure a Jewish majority in the State of Israel”.

The nature of the Israeli project was enshrined in law in 2018, with the passage of the Nation-State Basic Law. Section 1c reads as follows:

“The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.”

Section 7 declared the development of Jewish settlement a national value and required the state to encourage and consolidate it. This enshrined both ethnic supremacy – and colonisation.

Indeed, when the Palestinian-led Balad party proposed a Basic Law defining Israel as a state of all its citizens, the Presidium of the Knesset - the legislature - blocked it from even being debated.

How can Zionism not be racism?

How is it possible not to conclude that racism is embedded in Zionism, both philosophically and in practice?

It was a movement based on creating a state in a land overwhelmingly inhabited by another people.

It is an ethno-nationalist movement, based on the supremacy of one ethnic group.

Indeed read the words of Israeli judge Oded Mudrik from Saturday:

Before the issue of support for terrorism and other difficulties, the prevention of integrating the Arab parties into the government stems from their perception of the State of Israel as a “state of all its citizens.” This is the opposite of the principle of the Jewish state, which is anchored in the Declaration of Independence, in Basic Laws, and in additional statutes. This has no connection to equality of civil rights and the integration of Arab citizens into public systems.

Here, he spells it out. The key problem with the Palestinian parties, he notes, is their belief in a state for all of its citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity. That is anathema to Israel’s very nature, as codified in its laws. He separates that from civil rights for non-Jewish citizens – but how can his formulation possibly not intrude on them?

There is nothing subtle about any of this. Racism is baked into Zionism precisely because it sought to carve out a state in a land overwhelmingly inhabited by another people.

Every settler-colonial project has to rationalise subjugating, stealing from and expelling an indigenous people. Zionism is no different – except it has been granted an opt-out as reparations for the murderous persecution of Jews by Europeans. That was not a crime committed by the Palestinian people – nor one they should have paid for.