In the modern geopolitical landscape, few words provoke such an immediate reaction as “Zionism”. Say it in a university seminar, at a dinner party or during a parliamentary debate, and watch the room divide. For some, it describes a sacred movement of national liberation – the long-overdue answer to two millennia of pogroms, expulsions and gas chambers. For others, it has become shorthand for displacement, siege and the architecture of apartheid.
Both reactions are understandable. Both are also, in their blunt form, incomplete.
As the global argument grows louder and uglier, a fundamental question keeps being buried beneath the slogans: What does Zionism actually mean? Not what your social media feed says it means, nor what a particular government needs it to mean on any given day, but what it represents historically, theologically and politically.
To make sense of the crisis unfolding in the Middle East – and the strange civil war it has triggered inside diaspora communities, churches, legislatures, and families – we have to pull apart a knot that has been tied so tightly for so long that most people assume it’s a single thread. Specifically, we need to draw a sharp line between two things that share a name but not a soul: the ancient religious relationship between the Jewish people and Zion, and the modern political project of building and maintaining a nation-state.
They are not the same. They were never the same. And the refusal to distinguish them has poisoned nearly every conversation we’re having.
1. Two Timelines, Two Logics
The confusion starts with chronology, so let’s begin there.
The Jewish connection to Zion – meaning Jerusalem, the Land of Israel and a particular sacred geography – is not a nineteenth-century invention. It is woven into the oldest layers of Jewish prayer, liturgy and collective memory. For roughly two thousand years after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, that bond endured as a spiritual orientation. It lived in the thrice-daily Amidah prayer, in the Passover Seder’s closing refrain, “Next year in Jerusalem”, and in the wedding ritual of breaking a glass to remember a destroyed city. It also survived in poetry, lamentation and the quiet insistence that exile was a condition to be endured but never fully accepted.
Here is the crucial point that is so often missed: for much of those two thousand years, mainstream rabbinic theology held that the return to Zion would be accomplished by God rather than by human hands. Many authorities understood the Talmudic concept of the “Three Oaths”, drawn from the Song of Songs, as prohibiting an organised mass Jewish return to the Land before the messianic age. You prayed towards Jerusalem and longed for it, but you did not build an army and seize it. Redemption would be cosmic and divine, not a policy platform.
This is the spiritual inheritance. It is real, it is ancient, and it belongs to the Jewish people in a way that no secular government can claim to own exclusively.
Then came the late nineteenth century, and with it a very different world.
In the shtetls of the Russian Empire, the drawing rooms of Vienna and the crowded tenements of Paris, Jewish intellectuals were confronting a brutal empirical fact: the Enlightenment, emancipation and assimilation had not made them safe. The pogroms of 1881–84 shattered Russia’s liberal promise; the Dreyfus Affair of 1894 did the same in France. Theodor Herzl, a secular, assimilated Viennese journalist covering the Dreyfus trial, watched a Parisian crowd cry “Death to the Jews” and concluded that no degree of cultural integration would protect his people. The answer, he decided, was not spiritual redemption but sovereignty: a flag, an army and a seat at the table of nations.
Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896. He convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. And in doing so, he performed a very specific act of translation: he took the ancient religious vocabulary of Zion – its imagery, its emotional charge, its pull on Jewish memory – and repurposed it as the branding for a modern European nationalist project. The language was sacred. The machinery was secular, diplomatic, and ultimately military.
This is political Zionism. It is roughly 130 years old and follows the logic of nineteenth-century European nation-building: a people, a territory and a state. Its methods are those of geopolitics – lobbying, immigration, land purchase and, when deemed necessary, war.
The dividing line, then, is not subtle once you see it:
The religious relationship to Zion is a covenant between a people and a sacred geography, mediated through prayer, law, and the patient expectation of divine action. The political project of Zionism is a nationalist movement concerned with borders, demographics, military deterrence, and international recognition. One is oriented toward God. The other is oriented toward the UN Security Council.
They can overlap in a single person’s heart, certainly. But they are not the same thing, and treating them as identical is the foundational sleight-of-hand that has warped the entire discourse.
2. The People Who Hold the Line – and Are Erased for It
This is where the issue becomes uncomfortable – and where public discussion most seriously falls short.
Because the State of Israel, from its founding, fused these two timelines into a single national story – the ancient longing fulfilled by the modern state – it became almost impossible to publicly occupy the space between them. The state’s legitimacy narrative requires that 1948 be read as the culmination of the Passover Seder, as the answer to two thousand years of prayer. To question the state is therefore framed, by the state’s own logic, as questioning the faith.
But there has always been a tradition that refuses that framing.
Certain ultra-Orthodox communities – the Satmar Hasidim, the Neturei Karta, elements of the Edah HaChareidis in Jerusalem – have maintained, for decades, a theological position that is often baffling to outsiders: they are deeply, fiercely attached to the Land of Israel as a holy space, they observe every commandment tied to it, and they oppose the existence of the State of Israel as a political entity. Their reasoning draws on the Three Oaths and on the argument that a Jewish state established by secular, socialist politicians, maintained by military force, and built in part through the displacement of another people, is not redemption. It is, in their view, a blasphemy dressed in the language of fulfillment.
You do not have to agree with their theology to recognize that it exists, that it is internally coherent, and that it is Jewish. When a Satmar rabbi says, “I love Zion and I reject the Zionist state,” he is not being contradictory. He is drawing the line I am describing.
And he is not alone, even if his is the most theologically absolute version of the argument. There is a broader spectrum of religious and ethical Jewish thought that separates the land from the state apparatus. Thinkers influenced by Martin Buber’s binationalism. The small but persistent tradition of religious peace activists in Hebron and the West Bank who argue, from within halakhic reasoning, that settling occupied territory violates Jewish law. Rabbis in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements who affirm Jewish peoplehood and connection to Israel while openly opposing occupation and the Nation-State Law.
What unites them is a refusal to let a government speak for God. The land is holy. The state is a human institution, fallible, often cruel, and subject to moral judgment like any other government. You can grieve for the Temple and still condemn a checkpoint. You can fast on Tisha B’Av and still march against a settlement.
The problem – the real, grinding problem – is that this position has almost no space in mainstream discourse. In Israel, it is dismissed as naive or self-hating. In Western media, it is invisible; the binary presented is “Zionist” or “antisemite,” with no room for the person who says, “I am a religious Jew, Zion is in my prayers every day, and I believe the IDF’s conduct in Gaza is a moral catastrophe.” When politicians or journalists flatten that distinction – when they treat criticism of a government’s military campaign as an attack on Judaism itself – they erase centuries of Jewish ethical reasoning. They do the state’s work for it.
I should also correct a common misattribution here. You will sometimes see Ahad Ha’am cited as an early religious critic of political Zionism. He was not religious in the halakhic sense. He was a cultural Zionist – secular, but deeply invested in Zionism as a spiritual and cultural renewal project rather than a purely political one. His famous warning, written in 1891 after visiting Ottoman Palestine, was that the early settlers were treating the local Arab population with contempt and that this would ultimately corrode the moral character of the entire enterprise. “We must not treat the people of the land with hostility and cruelty,” he wrote, “nor restrict their rights.” He was right, and he was ignored, and his warning came from a place of cultural ethics rather than religious law. But the point stands: the critique is as old as the project.
3. Inside Israel: How the Sacred Became a Policy Tool
Within Israel itself, the distinction between the spiritual and the political has not simply blurred. Political actors who benefit from the confusion have deliberately and methodically dismantled it.
The early Zionist establishment – Ben-Gurion, the Labor movement, the kibbutzniks – was overwhelmingly secular. They used religious symbolism the way nationalist movements everywhere use cultural inheritance: as glue. The state funded a chief rabbinate, maintained religious courts for marriage and divorce, and kept a Sabbath observance in public life, largely to accommodate the religious minority and give the new nation a veneer of continuity with the Jewish past. Religion was a department, not a driver.
That has changed, and the change is not subtle.
The Dati Leumi – Religious Zionist – community, once a moderate, somewhat peripheral faction, has moved over the past four decades toward the centre of Israeli political gravity. The ideological engine behind this shift is the theology of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (Rav Kook, d. 1935) and, more aggressively, his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. The elder Rav Kook developed a mystical theology in which the secular Zionist project, even carried out by atheists, was unknowingly serving as the instrument of divine redemption – the “beginning of the flowering of our redemption,” as the phrase goes. The younger Rav Kook, after 1967, applied this theology directly to the occupied territories: the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan were not bargaining chips. They were the biblical heartland. To relinquish them was not a political concession; it was a sin against God’s plan.
This is not a fringe position. It is the theological backbone of the settlement movement. It is the language of Gush Emunim, of the Yesha Council, of the politicians who now sit in coalition governments and speak of “Judea and Samaria” not as occupied territory but as an inheritance held in trust by the Almighty. When Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir speaks about the West Bank, they are not making a security argument. They are making a messianic one. And messianic arguments do not compromise. They do not accept partition. They do not recognize the legitimacy of the other side’s claim to the same soil, because the claim is not political. It is divine.
The practical consequences of this fusion are not abstract:
The settlement enterprise in the West Bank, now home to roughly 800,000 Israeli settlers, is justified not primarily through security doctrine but through theological entitlement. The legal framework that governs the occupied territories – military law for Palestinians, civil law for settlers – is defended not as a temporary security measure but as the natural order of a promised land. The Nation-State Law of 2018, which enshrined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and demoted Arabic from an official language, was framed by its architects as a correction, a reassertion of primordial belonging against what they saw as the dilution of Jewish sovereignty.
And the fusion provides a perfect shield against accountability. If the state is not merely a government but a vehicle of divine will, then criticizing its policies is not democratic dissent. It is sacrilege. Opposition is not a political position; it is a betrayal of the covenant. This framing makes it extraordinarily difficult for Israeli citizens – Jewish or Arab – to mount internal challenges without being branded traitors, and it makes external criticism nearly impossible to engage with in good faith.
4. The Global Weaponisation of Zionism for Non-Jewish Agendas
This part of the story receives the least attention, yet deserves the most.
The political project of Zionism has not merely been weaponized by the Israeli state. It has been seized, bent, and repurposed by actors who have no connection to Jewish life, Jewish theology, or Jewish safety. And this weaponization flows in both directions: some use Zionism as a cudgel, others use it as a stage prop in someone else’s eschatological drama.
The Western Political Utility
In Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, support for Israel has long been framed in the language of shared values, democratic solidarity, and post-Holocaust moral obligation. And for some policymakers, that language is sincere. But it would be naive to ignore the strategic architecture underneath. Israel is the most reliable military-intelligence partner in a volatile, oil-rich region. It is a testing ground for weapons systems. It is a voting bloc and a donor network. Western governments that treat Israel as a geopolitical asset have a vested interest in the narrative that Political Zionism and Judaism are indistinguishable, because that narrative makes criticism of Israeli policy functionally equivalent to bigotry, which is easier to shut down than a substantive debate about international law.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive structure. And it works. In the United States, bipartisan support for Israel remains one of the few truly unshakeable fixtures of foreign policy, sustained in part by organizations like AIPAC that explicitly frame opposition to Israeli government policy as antisemitism. In the UK, the definition of antisemitism adopted by the Labour Party in 2018 became a battlefield precisely because it raised the question: where does legitimate criticism of a state end and hatred of a people begin? The fact that this question is so contested, and so politically dangerous to raise, is itself evidence of how thoroughly the two concepts have been welded together in public discourse.
Christian Zionism: The Elephant in the Sanctuary
And then there is the phenomenon that should be far more widely discussed than it is: Christian Zionism.
The numbers alone are staggering. Organizations like Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded by Pastor John Hagee, claim memberships in the tens of millions in the United States alone. Evangelical churches across the American South, the Midwest, and increasingly the Global South fly Israeli flags next to the cross. They lobby Congress. They fund settlements. They vote in blocs. They are, by any measure, the largest pro-Israel constituency in the world, dwarfing the American Jewish community.
And their theology has essentially nothing to do with Jewish wellbeing.
Christian Zionism is rooted in a specific strand of dispensationalist eschatology – the Left Behind novels, the Hal Lindsey prophecy books, the end-times charts pinned to Sunday school corkboards. In this framework, the physical ingathering of Jews in the Land of Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the assertion of Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem are not goods in themselves. They are prerequisites. They are the checkboxes that must be ticked before the Second Coming of Christ can occur. Before the Battle of Armageddon. Before the Rapture.
And here is the detail that should make everyone pause: in the standard dispensationalist narrative, the end of this sequence involves the mass conversion or destruction of the Jewish people. The Jews are gathered to Israel not so they can thrive, but so they can be cast into the final tribulation. The theology is, if you follow it to its conclusion, a story in which Jewish existence in the Land is instrumentalized for a Christian eschatological payoff that ends, for Jews, very badly.
And yet this constituency pushes Israel’s political leadership toward its most maximalist, most uncompromising positions. They oppose partition. They oppose concessions. They fund outposts in the West Bank. They lobby the US Congress to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital – not because they have thought carefully about Palestinian rights or international law, but because their pastor told them it was in the Bible.
The Israeli political establishment, to its considerable credit in terms of realpolitik if not ethics, has embraced this alliance warmly. Money is money. Lobbying power is lobbying power. The fact that the theological endgame of your most enthusiastic supporters involves your own destruction is a problem for another century. Right now, they vote, they donate, and they keep the American embassy in Jerusalem.
This is the co-option of Zionism by people who are not Jewish, who have no stake in Jewish continuity, and who are advancing a political project toward a horizon that is explicitly, theologically non-Jewish. And it has made the line between spiritual and political Zionism not just blurred but grotesquely distorted.
5. Reclaiming the Distinction
In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In 1991, it revoked that resolution. The debate has never actually settled. It just went underground, resurfacing every time a ceasefire collapses or a settlement expands or a student gets expelled for what she said at a rally.
And the reason the debate never settles is that the two sides are, in a very literal sense, talking about different things.
When a Palestinian activist or a South African legal scholar says “Zionism is racism,” they are looking at the political project. They are looking at the Nation-State Law. They are looking at the differential legal regimes in the West Bank. They are looking at the Nakba and the ongoing displacement in East Jerusalem and the Negev. They are applying the language of international human rights law to a state’s policies, the way you would apply it to any state’s policies. To call that observation inherently antisemitic is to grant the Israeli government a theological exemption from scrutiny that no other government on earth receives.
When a rabbi or a Jewish community leader hears “Zionism is racism” and recoils, they are often looking at the spiritual principle. They are hearing an attack on the Jewish people’s right to self-understanding, to memory, to a homeland after centuries of persecution. They are hearing the old accusation repackaged: that Jews do not belong, that their deepest attachments are fraudulent, that their grief is a pretext. And that fear is not irrational. It is written in the marrow of a people who have been expelled from more countries than they can count.
Both reactions are intelligible. They are aimed at different targets. The tragedy – the real, grinding, daily tragedy – is that the political state needs the spiritual principle as a shield. It needs you to feel that criticizing a bombing campaign in Gaza is the same thing as desecrating the Western Wall. It needs the conflation. It feeds on it. Every time a politician says, “An attack on Israel is an attack on the Jewish people,” they are collapsing the line I’ve been trying to draw, and they are doing it deliberately, because the line is the one thing that threatens them.
And the non-Jewish actors – the Christian Zionist lobby, the strategic allies, the arms dealers, the politicians who need the donor money – have their own reasons to keep the line collapsed. Clarity does not serve them. A simple story serves them.
So the distinction must be drawn repeatedly by anyone who can still recognise it.
You can believe that the Land of Israel is holy. You can say “Next year in Jerusalem” at your Seder table and mean it in your bones. You can grieve the Temple, keep Shabbat, teach your children the psalms that name the hills of Judea. And you can also say, clearly and without apology, that the State of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians are unjust, that the occupation must end, that no divine promise licenses the bulldozing of a family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah.
Those two sentences can live in the same mouth. They have lived in the same mouth for a very long time, in synagogues and study halls and kitchen tables where people took the Torah seriously enough to let it judge them, not just their enemies.
The spiritual yearning for Zion belongs to the Jewish people. It is ancient, and it is theirs, and no one gets to take it from them – not the UN, not a boycott campaign, not a politician who needs a soundbite.
The political state of Israel is a government. It has borders and laws and an army and a tax code. It can be praised, criticized, sanctioned, reformed, or opposed, like any other government. It does not get to wrap itself in a prayer shawl and claim that accountability is persecution.
Until we can hold both of those truths at the same time – until the discourse stops demanding that you choose between them – the conversation will keep circling the same drain. And the people who pay the price for that circular conversation will not be the politicians, or the lobbyists, or the pastors with their end-times charts. It will be the kid in Gaza pulling rubble off his sister. It will be the elderly woman in a West Bank village watching a bulldozer take her olive grove. It will be the young Israeli conscript who will carry what he did in Hebron for the rest of his life.
The distinction is not difficult to see. It is difficult to hold because doing so means disappointing everyone who insists that you choose a side. Yet it is the only honest place to stand – and the only ground from which something resembling justice for Jews, Palestinians and the land itself might eventually be built.