[Prefatory Note: this post is an expanded version of my responses to questions posed by aTurkish journalist, Murat Sofuoğlu, who quoted me rather extensively in his excellentInterpretative article published on Oct. 15, 2026 in TRT World with the title, “How Israel’sPolicies Exposed Zionism’s Racist Foundations.” The linked issues of the continuing Gaza ordeal(now temporarily removed from primary Western governmental policy concerns) withprospects for a durable and just peace, the future of Zionism, Trump’s Board of Peace, andlegitimated Palestinian representation as determined by Palestinians. This revision offers amore detailed analysis of a renewed interest in the inherent properties of Zionism as a politicalideology and its connections with Israel as a sovereign state with rights and obligations underinternational law with regard to prohibitions on racism and apartheid.]
- The UK Green Party has recently labeled Zionism as a racist ideology. What do you think about it?
The UK Green Party formal labeling of Zionism as an ‘ethnonationalist project’ is a significant reminder that Israel’s high standing in Western liberal democracies is now problematic, including even among those governments that supported Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, and even among its citizenry. At the same time, it still remains controversial for these complicit government to lessen the legitimacy of Israel as a sovereign state. At the Green Party gathering the vote was surprisingly close, 1022-813, and the new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, made a point of publicly rejecting the resolution.
The Green Party leadership, including 5 MPs, sensitive to the controversial nature of its position, tabled a motion strongly reconfirming the pro-Palestinian political commitments of the Green Party as including Palestinian self-determination, Palestinian liberation, right of return, BDS, and a full arms embargo. These pro-Palestinian positions were linked to Green Party support of universal human rights, with explicit mention of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation. The motion ended with rather the mystifying words of a hopeful future: “There is no conflict between the rights of Palestinian people and rights of Jewish people.” After over a century of bloody conflict, how can one explain reconcile such a transcendent sentiment with such a forthright condemnation of Zionist racism as embodied in fundamental policies, practices, and laws of Israel, and currently facing no signs of the internal weakening of or challenges to Israel’s adherence to Zionist ideology.
The global debate about whether the state of Israel should be equated with Zionism has long been intense and inconclusive, although less so since 2023. At the global level issues about Israeli racism were provoked by the controversial and bitterly contested adoption on November 10, 1975 of General Assembly Resolution 3379 (‘Zionism is racism’), adopted by a vote of 72-32, with 35 states abstaining. It was overwhelming supported by the countries of the Global South, unanimously by Muslim majority countries. Latin American governments were somewhat split in voting on 3379, but it was overwhelmingly and angrily opposed by the Euro-American Atlanticist countries.
The resolution remained a thorn in Israel’s side even though it did alter the Israeli approach to its Palestinian minority, was withdrawn in 1991 after President George H.W. Bush insisted that 3379 be revoked. Informed commentary explains the timing of this unusual pressure to withdraw a validly adopted UN resolution as a response to Israel’s demand that such action was a precondition to its willingness to take part in the 1991 Madrid Conference alongside the PLO participation. The Madrid event was treated as a breakthrough in peacemaking efforts in the Israel/Palestine struggle helped set the stage for bilateral negotiation subsequently arranged within the 1993 Oslo framework. The manner chosen to revoke 3379 can be seen as a comprise. It definitely reflected Israel’s leverage and pragmatic approach to a diplomatic mode of conflict resolution by way of a negotiated peace within a political process that its main ally, the United States, would oversee in its role as intermediary. Yet the absence of any principled expression of regret for the past adoption of 3379 and an explicit exoneration of Israel as not guilty of past or present charges of racism keeps the issue in a state of flux of being neither dead nor alive.
This reluctance of the General Assembly to acknowledge that it had been wrong to single out Israel in 1975 with a formal UN accusation of Zionist racism may have prompted one of the more effective and respected UN Secretary Generals, Kofi Annan, to volunteer an factually baseless apologetic comment about the supposed past UN susceptibility to antisemitism in its relation to Israel: “The actions of the United Nations on the issue of antisemitism have not always been worthy of its ideals. It is deplorable that the General Assembly adopted in 1975 a resolution which assimilated Zionism with racism and I welcome this later effort to take it back.” We may never know whether Annan’s comment reflected his moral beliefs or were his way of accommodating geopolitical pressures.
The timing of this turn to diplomacy in 1991 can be partly interpreted as responses to the then recent transformative abandonment of apartheid by a racist South African government that surprised the world by unilaterally opting for constitutional democracy and ethnic equality. What occurred by way of a governmental initiative in South Africa, was hoped to be achieved in a form satisfying to Israel and the PLO. This peacemaking diplomacy somewhat dubiously presupposed a ‘two-state solution’ based on the ceasefire boundaries of the 1948 War, which reinterpreted the UN Partition Resolution in favor of Israel, allocating 78% of Ottoman/Mandate Palestine to Israel, and the remaining 22% to Palestine. Why the PLO ever accepted this one-sided allocation of land rights as between the parties is one of several mysteries of that period, which gave rise to a public aura of hope that seemed genuinely committed to political compromise and a negotiated mutually accepted peace accord. The U.S. used its influence to persuade Palestinians to defer consideration of other grievances, especially the Israeli settlement movement that was carried out in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation and its insistence that the Palestinian state be permanently demilitarized. These one-sided features of the interaction between Israel and representatives of the Palestinian people were either an example of hard bargaining by Israel or a way of confronting Palestine with such a bad deal as it had no alternative than to refuse, which would give Israel an excuse to continue with its unilateralist approach to the future of the relationship between itself and Palestine. Important Palestinian intellectuals, most notably Edward Said, rejected what he perceived as a diplomatic charade that entrapped Palestine and allowed Israel to proceed with the Zionist vision of a solution. Said blamed Arafat for not standing up more firmly to the U.S. in the performative aspects of its role as partisan mediator.
I think there is abundant evidence to document allegations of Israeli racism throughout the whole of Israel’s existence, as carried to genocidal extremes in its behavior since 2023. In the period after the 1991 revocation of 3370 a series of independently research studies that documented systemic Israeli racism as a form of apartheid, and as such in violation of international law as set forth in widely ratified international treaties. In collaboration with Virginia Tilley I prepared a research report that was commissioned by the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) and publicly released in 2017. The principal conclusion of our Report was that Israel had imposed a racist regime that discriminated against non-Jewish minorities in violation of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid (adopted at the UN in 1973 by a vote of 91-4, with 26 abstentions; the four opposed votes were cast by the U.S., Portugal, UK, and South Africa). The underlying International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination is also relevant to a legal assessment of racism,. [Falk & Virginia Tilley, “Israeli Practices Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” 2017]
The ESCWA report was followed by detailed confirmatory reports prepared by Human Rights Watch, 2021, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, 2021, and Amnesty International, 2022.] The release of our Report with its UN imprimatur (but also containing a pro-forma disclaimer, informing readers thata the report was reflective of the views of its authors, but not necessarily of the UN)provoked an angry counterattack at the UN, led by Israel and strongly supported by the U.S., including a thinly veiled threat from the U.S. Representative at the UN of financial repercussions for the UN if the report was not repudiated and withdrawn. The Director of ESCWA, Rima Khalaf, resigned on principle in protest, to Guterres caving to U.S. pressure in relation to our report. This move on her part was widely appreciated throughout West Asia. Despite taking great offense at being labeled an apartheid state, Israel itself virtually acknowledged this main allegation in the ESCWA Report for its own reasons a year later. The Knesset adopted the 2018 Basic Law
proclaiming Jewish preeminence in Israel and vesting the right of self-determination to be
and as a nationalist add on, designated Hebrew as Israel’s only official language.
Guterres should have learned that even mild challenges to Israel would result in a nasty backlash from the wildly over-reaction by Israel to his banal truism ‘October 7 did not occur in a vacuum.’ The Israel representative angrily dismissed the comment while demanding Guterres’ resignation. Guterres weathered that storm in 2018, but
learned the wrong lesson. Namely, that it was prudent for him to do what it takes to keep on the good side of the United States, which automatically extends to Israel, but that prudence would destroy his reputation as a dedicated, principled international servant, a voice of conscience for the entire world. Not only Guterres but other UN secretaries general did not responsibly live up to the role, eroding the moral authority of the UN, and shifting moral trust to such global voices of conscience as Pope Leo XIV.
To our regret, the ESCWA Report was immediately ordered to be officially withdrawn by the recently elected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, a sign of individual and institutional weakness that was to be repeated by Guterres in several settings involving Palestine. The most serious of these lapses was his failure to affirm and stand up the competence and contributions of the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, especially after she was sanctioned in 2025 by the U.S. Government. She was sanctioned for her courageous fully analyzed and fact-based assessments of Israeli genocide, and specifically for her recommendation in report as Special Rapporteur that the ICC investigate named corporations to assess whether their profitable operations in Gaza during the genocide constituted the criminal complicity under the Genocide Convention. Guterres as well showed his colors by bowing low in deference to the perverse Trump 20-Point Peace Plan even though its main administrative innovation, the Board of Peace, deliberately marginalized the UN role. in Israel exclusively belonging to the Jewish people,
Despite this Israeli and US irate reactions against formal efforts to brand Israel as racist, the accusation again surfaced widely in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide initiated in response to the October 7 Hamas attack. In this altered atmosphere of Israel’s genocide and regional warmongering, the racist character of Zionist Israel again became a prime target of civil society accusations. The British Green racist labeling of Israel should be appraised in this light. It seems definitely in keeping with a widespread revived call for reinstating the 1975 resolution or a sequel coupled with a bypassing of the 1991 revocation. The racism attributed to Israel by the UNGA Resolution seemed fully vindicated by Israel’s genocidal statements referring to Palestinians as ‘human animals’ along with other epithets as well as the combat tactics of IDF violence in Gaza, and seems to justify the restoration or replacement of 3379, ideally supplemented by a revised text that takes account of the developments between 2023 and 2026, with a reassertion of pre-October 7 racism. A new UN initiative is essential to avoid a growing impression that when a UN censure is directed at Israel, no matter how much it conforms to fact and law, as well as implement UN Charter principles, it necessarily falls short of implementation due to the sanitizing shadows of weaponized antisemitism.
The Israeli reaction to 3379 back in 1975 was, as might be expected, vigorously denied by Israel’s representive at the UN, Chaim Herzog: “For us the Jewish people this resolution based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance is devoid of any moral and legal value. For us, as Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Herzog followed his diatribe performatively by tearing the paper in half on which the text of the resolution was written. It comes as no surprise that Israel had predictable allies, including the American UN Representative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan who asserted on Israel’s behalf an Orwellian repudiation of 3379: “The United Nations is about to make antisemitism international law.” Such language implies that the allegations against Israel were not a response to its treatment of the Palestinians, but was merely an excuse for demeaning a Jewish state, and in the process, the UN itself.
It was during the last three years that the fusion of Zionism as ideology and Israel as a sovereign state openly merged their identity and resorted to the weaponization of antisemitism as a tactic in the practice of ‘the politics of distraction,’ designed to shift attention from the substance of the message to the character of the messenger. This fusion facilitated defaming critics of Zionism, including Jewish critics, as antisemites and self-hating Jews. As a personal aside, it happens that my father and many of his friends in the postwar climate of New York City in the immediate aftermath of World War II welcomed Israel as a safe haven for the Jews but opposed and feared the consequences of a partition approach that neglected the rights and wellbeing of the resident majority population and an accompanying Zionist vintage Orientalist claim of Judaism having a far superior sense of entitlement to the land in dispute than was possessed by the residential Arab majority population. In a sense, their position manifested their beliefs that a Zionist Israel was doomed to self-destruct.
The plausibility of seeking a revival of the 1975 condemnation of Israel’s racism reformulated in light of the genocidal violence of the past three years would certainly seem an appropriate reassertion of UN moral leadership that would somewhat compensate for its ill-considered recent endorsement of Trump’s Gaza diplomacy as expressed in the shameful UN Security Council Resolution 2803 unanimously adopted in November 2025. A critical repudiation of the Trump approach at the UN seems unlikely. Perhaps, more likely is a reconsideration by Arab governments of the prudence and propriety of the Abrahamic Accords normalizing relations of regional actors with Israel that was a diplomatic initiative undertaken in 2020 with great fanfare during the final weeks of the Trump’s first term as the American president. Even prior to Israel’s response to October 7, this diplomacy of normalization seemed premature due to the failure to defer such reconciliatory steps until the most serious of Palestinian grievances were addressed.
To remove any ambiguity about the unrepentant complicity of the United States in relation to the genocide, Trump announced just nine days prior to the Israeli elections on October 27, 2026 of his unqualified ‘complete and total support’ for Netanyahu’s reelection pointing to his success as ‘a warrior’ and compatibility as ‘a partner’ in the war against Iran. It was the first time an American president has made such a public endorsement of candidate in an Israeli election. We can wait and see whether Trump’s endorsement helps or hurts his election prospects.
2. Is there a real global trend that Zionism has been increasingly identified as an aggressive ideology since October 7?
It is reasonable to conclude that Zionism has been seriously discredited by Israel’s response to the October 7th attack, not only by the detailed findings of the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine and further substantiated by the extensive report of UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Navi Pillay, who happens to be this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner. The U.S by sanctioning of ICC and UN officials, the denial of visas to Palestine Authority officials seeking to attend this year’s General Assembly debate session has not only proclaimed United States complicity with Israel’s genocide as a continuing reality, but has deepened the perception of Zionism as an aggressive ideology abhorrent to many countries in the world as made visible by the walkout of many delegations when it came time for Netanyahu to address the 2026 GA session. The events of the last three years have delegitimized Israel as a sovereign state, and this perception has not been weakened, at least among civil society activists, by the Trump ‘peace’ diplomacy that rewards the perpetrator and further punishes the victim.
Additionally, the perception that Israel is dominated by its steadfast adherence to a supremist version of Zionism, delegitimizes Israel further and gives an unintended accuracy to judgments that regard anti-Zionism as identical now with anti-Israel attitudes in the form of a highly critical stance toward Israel’s approach to the Palestinian people. To take the further step as is often taken by militant supporters of Israel intent of weaponizing antisemitism who allege that being critical of Israel, especially if it is portrayed as holding Israel to higher standards than apply to other alleged wrongdoing states, is antisemitism. This weaponizing of antisemitism as a policy tool to discredit and intimidate good faith critics has the unfortunate effect of also allowing genuine Jew haters political space to escape repudiation or enables their participation as respectable partners in bewildering mergers of antisemitic advocates with ultra-right pro-Israeli politics surging in influence especially in Europe that is currently facing a series of populist challenges to public order in leading states, most dramatically France.
It is totally inappropriate and defamatory to discredit the reputation of good faith and credible critics as antisemites because they document Israeli criminality and often insist that the only way for Israel to retrieve its legitimacy as a state and UN member is to repudiate or drastically revise its statist adherence to Zionism. This raises the further question of whether Zionism is susceptible to reconciliation with contemporary standards of international humanitarian law. At present, there are few signs of political will in Israel favorable to such humanizing reforms of Zionism, and thus sadly racism aggravated by ethnic cleansing and Israel’s repudiation of credible criticism from former supporters seems to reflect a persisting Israeli pro-Zionist consensus, portending a dismal future for itself and for Palestinians: For Israel to continue down the post-2023 path chosen and for Palestinians to experience a new phase of their ordeal of resilience and resistance to the colonial Orientalism of the Balfour Declaration that began more than a century ago.
3. What is Zionism? Is it really a racist ideology?
An objective historical study of Zionism would have no responsible alternative to the conclusion that the seeds of racism were present when the Zionist Movement was founded by Theodor Herzl and a few others toward the end of the 19th Century, leading to international meetings of the World Zionist Congress in 1897. It should be appreciated that Zionism started as a movement among Jews mainly ti counter the racism embedded in European antisemitism, which had Christian roots and reached its climax during Nazi rule in Germany during the 1930s, culminating in the Holocaust in the last years of the war. The early Zionist articulated movement priority was to gain support for a Jewish national homeland situating in Palestine. In retrospect it appears that Zionist expressions of good intentions and reassurances with respect to human rights and coexistence with the resident majority Palestinian population were tactical public relations efforts by the early secular leaders rather than serious political commitments by dedicated Zionists, many of whom were also motivated by religious sentiments and Jewish cultural traditions. Under cover of the 1948 War the Zionist militias immediately pursued a highly coercive massive ethnic cleansing operation, generating 750,000 Palestinian refugees and reinforced by a refusal to fulfill international refugee law requirements of upholding a right of return. Instead, Israel destroyed the homes of most refugees by bulldozing hundreds of Palestinian villages. The Atlanticist alliance and the global public were silent about the Nakba, giving Zionism a free pass to establish Israel as they proposed, an indulgence influenced by the recently revealed magnitude and horrors of the Holocaust. Public support also was generated by early idealist kibbutz experimentation in communal living that was widely perceived as a sign of Israel social creativity and idealism.
Despite the British mandate in Palestine between the two world wars there was scant awareness of the suffering caused by this forcible, unlawful displacement of Palestinians from their homes and homeland in 1948. In the interim Israel solidified its relations with the United States especially after the 1967 War, achieving impressive success in its development of formidable military capabilities and general developmental progress. Over the years, expanded explicit embrace of strategic ambitions with respect to the acquisition of territory, the elimination of unwanted Palestinians, and a warmongering approach to its national security that increasingly was fused with its U.S. partnership and hegemonic policy toward neighbors.
Zionism also had its own racist outlook independent of its connections with Israel and Judaism that derived from its European origins that included an assumed Orientalist version of Western cultural superiority and a disregard of the rights of inferior non-Europeans, especially as embedded in Islamic majority countries of the MENA region. It pursued its vision of a Jewish state in a highly pragmatic, step-by-step fashion, advancing toward its goals by stages whose features were dictated by political calculations of viable policy options. Important stages included the Balfour Declaration of 1917pledging support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland (not a state) in Palestine, a country which the UK administered after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I by relying on its standard colonial logic of ‘divide and rule’ to bi-national political communities.
The next stage was the Nazi rulership in Germany that initially made a sanctuary for Jews compatible with Hitler’s prime antisemitic goal of reducing the Jewish presence and influence in Europe. This stage was followed by the rise of Arab anti-colonial nationalism and Zionist led anti-British nationalism that persuaded Britain to turn the future of embattled Palestine over to the UN with its customary recommendation of partition when in colonial retreat, which was followed disastrously in this instance. The Mandate period witnessed a dramatic increase in Jewish immigration increasing its presence in Palestine from under 10% prior to the Balfour Declaration to more than 30% in 1947 when the partition resolution was adopted In the aftermath of World War II Orientalist attitudes combined with liberal guilt associated with allowing Hitler to get away with extreme forms of antisemitism provided the political foundations for a Zionist settler colonial project to establish a Jewish state within the boundaries of mandate Palestine. Israel appeared to accept the partition as a solution but never giving up its long game determination to achieve unified Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Palestine, and maybe beyond. The Palestinians, were at first supported in their grievances and aspirations by their Arab neighbors, especially the refusal to give away half their country without the UN feeling obliged to obtain their consent to such a rupture of their territorial integrity. The conflict over land and rights deepened and persisted, punctuated by a series of wars won by Israel and climaxing with the violence unleashed in the last three years in retaliation for long deferred resistance militancy by the oppressed Palestinian population of Gaza.
At the same time as the secular leadership of the Zionist movement invoked the Bible. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared ‘let the Bible be our sword.’ Through the years religiously motivated ranks of Zionism rose in influence, and in time championed their undisguised refusal to share ‘the promised land,’ favoring cruel and dehumanizing treatment of the Palestinians, hoping for their voluntary departure but increasingly willing to use whatever tactics, including genocide, would help achieve racial purification. Israel gradually pu aside the willingness to partition Palestine into separate states. With its mastery of public discourse in the West Israel succeeded in persuading most people and many governments that a peaceful outcome was tried and failed, and the priorities of Israeli security deserve respect as the Palestinians had no appetite for a peaceful resolution of the conflict over sovereignty and land rights. Israel piously explained its rejection of diplomacy by claiming ‘we have no partner for peace.’ Further impartial investigation suggests that it was the Palestinians who had no partner for peace, claiming quite reasonably to have been misled by the pretensions of the Oslo Diplomacy in the 1990s.
In the end, a narrative responsive to realities of this long struggle has to overcome Israel’s skillful management of public discourse surrounding its behavior and motivations and that of its adversaries, which is given undeserved influence by mainstream media, many governments, and even civil society. We know somewhat about ‘the fog of war,’ but very little about ‘the fog deployed by state propaganda.’ We do realize that as of late 2026 the vivid portrayals of Gaza genocide has lifted some of the fog, at least temporarily, but far from totally.
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