Three Questions About Zionism
Provenance, Politics, and a Personal Reckoning
Abstract
This paper takes up three questions in sequence. First, is Zionism a Christian construct? The historical record places organized Restorationist agitation among English and American Protestants decades before Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, with William E. Blackstone delivering his Memorial to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 (Blackstone, 1891; Stanislawski, 2016). Second, is anti-Zionism antisemitic? The blanket equation collapses under scrutiny: long-standing Haredi rejection of the secular state on Talmudic grounds, a documented body of Jewish dissent from Zionism since the General Jewish Labor Bund and Edwin Montagu’s 1917 Cabinet memorandum, and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021) all treat opposition to a state ideology as a political position rather than ethnic hatred. Third, the paper closes with the author’s own argument that Zionism, as a settler-colonial state project bound up with Christian end-times theology and an ongoing Gaza catastrophe assessed as genocide by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has earned the harsh language a person of conscience reserves for sustained moral failure (Amnesty International, 2024; HRC, 2025; IAGS, 2025).
Keywords: Zionism, Christian Zionism, antisemitism, Gaza, dispensationalism, Blackstone Memorial, Jerusalem Declaration
A friend forwarded me Pat Johnson’s Medium piece, 25 Antisemitisms You Should Know (Johnson, 2026), with a note that read, more or less, What do you think? The piece dismisses the line that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism as a kindergarten retort (Johnson, 2026). I read it twice. I did not agree, and the disagreement turns on three questions worth answering in order. Was Zionism, in any meaningful institutional sense, a Christian construct before it was a Jewish political project? Is opposing it the same as hating Jews? And what does a skeptical agnostic Christian researcher in Sioux Falls, who has spent the last year reading Project Esther documents and ICJ provisional measures, actually think about all of it? The short answer to all three: yes, no, and that I think it is shite, in the precise British sense of being morally rotten at the seams. The long answer follows.
Question One: Is Zionism a Christian Construct?
The honest answer is yes and no, and the asymmetry matters. Modern political Zionism, as a self-conscious Jewish nationalist movement with a treasury, a Congress, and a flag, traces to Theodor Herzl, who published Der Judenstaat in February 1896 and convened roughly 200 delegates at the Stadtcasino Basel from August 29 to August 31, 1897 (Stanislawski, 2016). Herzl himself spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, had no Jewish education, and the historian Michael Stanislawski (2016) describes his Zionism as “purely political in theory and practice.” He worked from a secular nationalist template he found in the German civic culture around him. So the proximate parent of the institutional movement was a Vienna journalist with a goatee, and no synagogue habit, and his motivation was the iron pellet of European antisemitism that the Dreyfus trial had lodged under his skin (Shapell Manuscript Foundation, 2017).
That is the part that is not a Christian construct. The earlier the scaffolding is, the more uncomfortable the receipts are. The doctrine of premillennial dispensationalism, which holds that the return of the Jews to Palestine is a stop on the timetable of Christ’s second coming, was systematized by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), an Anglo-Irish minister of the Church of Ireland who left it to lead the Plymouth Brethren and travel further than the Apostle Paul (Sizer, n.d.; Wikipedia contributors, 2026a). Darby’s framework reached the United States through the Niagara Bible Conferences. It detonated into popular American Protestantism in 1909 with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, a prophecy chart in study Bible form (Wikipedia contributors, 2026b). The Anglo-American theological apparatus for caring about a Jewish return to Palestine sat in place a full generation before Herzl wrote a word.
It produced a real political artifact in 1891. The Methodist lay preacher William E. Blackstone, having published the bestseller Jesus Is Coming in 1878, delivered a petition to President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine on March 5, 1891, asking the United States to convene the great powers and grant Palestine to the Jews (Wikipedia contributors, 2026c). The Blackstone Memorial carried 413 signatures, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (Friends of Zion Museum, 2021). It predated Der Judenstaat by five years and the Basel program by six. Louis Brandeis, then the leading American Zionist and bound for the Supreme Court, called Blackstone the “ Father of Zionism” in correspondence that Nathan Straus carried to him in 1916 (Modern History Project, n.d.). Blackstone sent Herzl a personal Bible, marked up with the prophecies (Wikipedia contributors, 2026c). Brandeis worked with the seventy-five-year-old Methodist to draft a second Memorial, which was presented privately to President Woodrow Wilson and helped move the United States toward endorsing the 1917 Balfour Declaration (Wikipedia contributors, 2026c).
Read those dates again. A Methodist preacher with a prophecy chart got a petition into the Oval Office before any Jewish national congress had been called. The Anglo-Protestant lobby provided the diplomatic muscle. Herzl provided the institutional infrastructure. Both were necessary. Neither alone explains the State of Israel that the United Nations partition vote produced in 1947.
So the careful answer is this. Zionism is not a Christian construct in the sense that Christians invented it whole; observant Jews had prayed toward Jerusalem for two thousand years, and the Hovevei Zion societies were already moving Russian Jews to Ottoman Palestine by the 1880s. Zionism would not have reached state power without sustained Anglo-American Protestant patronage rooted in dispensationalist eschatology. The current shape of that patronage is John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, founded in 2006, with claimed membership of more than ten million, more than the entire American Jewish adult population of roughly 5.8 million (Curtis, 2025; Khalidi & Pesta, 2025). Andrew Chesnut of Virginia Commonwealth University has called Christian Zionism the “majority theology” among white American evangelicals (Erakat, 2019). Former Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer told an interviewer in 2021 that evangelicals were a more important constituency than American Jews, since they almost never criticize Israel (Khalidi & Pesta, 2025). The Israeli ambassador said that out loud, in English, on tape.
That is the political fact buried under the “unbreakable bond” language. The largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States is not Jewish; it is led by a Texas televangelist who preached, in a sermon later mass-marketed on cassette and CD, that God sent Adolf Hitler as a “hunter” to drive Jews toward the Promised Land. Hagee delivered the closing benediction at the dedication of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem in May 2018, alongside an opening prayer from Pastor Robert Jeffress, the same man who has said on Fox News that Jews are going to hell (Khalidi & Pesta, 2025; Posner, 2023). When a movement’s most powerful patron treats Jews as eschatological tinder, calling Zionism a wholly Jewish enterprise, it misreads the bookkeeping.
Question Two: Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic?
Sometimes. Often, no. Pat Johnson’s Medium piece (Johnson, 2026) wants the answer to be a flat yes and frames the distinction as a kindergarten dodge. The framing breaks the moment you walk through, who has historically rejected Zionism, and on what grounds.
Begin with the Jews who rejected Zionism before there was a state to reject. In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state, on the Reform principle that Jews were Americans of the Mosaic faith and Palestine was not their nation (Wikipedia contributors, 2026d). The chief rabbi of Vienna, Moritz Güdemann, denounced political Zionism in 1897 as a “mirage” (Foz Museum, 2022). Sir Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP and the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet during the Balfour deliberations, wrote a memorandum on August 23, 1917, titled On the Anti-Semitism of the Present Government, calling Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen,” and warning that Britain’s policy would “prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world” (Britain Palestine Project, 2012; Lorber, 2019). The General Jewish Labor Bund, the largest secular Jewish socialist movement in late-Tsarist Russia, advocated Jewish cultural autonomy in the lands where Jews already lived rather than emigration (Lorber, 2019). All of these positions are antisemitic, on Johnson’s framing, which is to say one then has to call leading rabbis, the Bund, and the only Jewish cabinet minister of his generation antisemites. The reduction writes itself.
Keep walking. The Haredi Edah HaChareidis in Jerusalem opposed Zionism as a sin against the Three Oaths in the Talmud (Ketubot 111a) before the British Mandate finished settling its furniture, and the position has continued in Satmar and in the Neturei Karta movement that Amram Blau founded in Jerusalem in 1938 (Wikipedia contributors, 2026e). These men dress in shtreimels, speak Yiddish at home, refuse Israeli citizenship, refuse to vote in Israeli elections, and carry signs that read “Torah true Jews oppose the occupation of all Palestine” at protests in Brooklyn and London (Forward, 2023). One can find Neturei Karta theology unappetizing, as I do, and still notice that calling these men antisemites turns the word into a weapon that takes off the user’s own foot.
Anti-Zionism among contemporary Jews is, if anything, growing. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) declared itself anti-Zionist in 2019 and reported having more than 32,000 active dues-paying members by 2024, with chapters at universities across the United States (Wikipedia contributors, 2026f). IfNotNow, Independent Jewish Voices, and a generational drift in survey data on younger American Jews all point in the same direction: opposition to the political project is no longer a fringe Haredi affair. To call all of these Jews self-haters, in the way Johnson’s argument requires, is to sell the diagnostic word for the price of an insult.
The cleanest treatment of when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism is in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), signed in 2021 by more than two hundred scholars of antisemitism, Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and Middle East studies, including David Feldman of the Pears Institute, Peter Beinart, and Avishai Margalit (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, 2021). The JDA was drafted as a corrective to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition, whose seven Israel-related examples have been wielded on the ground to silence Palestinian speech in classrooms and city councils (Pollin-Galay, 2021). The JDA states plainly that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” is, on its face, not antisemitic; that boycott, divestment, and sanctions are not, on their face, antisemitic; and that comparisons between Israeli policy and historical apartheid are not, on their face, antisemitic, when the goal is to critique state policy (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, 2021). The JDA does not pretend that anti-Zionism is always innocent. It does pretend that classification matters and that classifying everything as antisemitism classifies nothing as antisemitism.
Some anti-Zionism is antisemitism wearing a keffiyeh. Cartoons of hook-nosed bankers running the world, blood-libel echoes about “child sacrifice,” and the older move of holding diaspora Jews collectively responsible for the Israeli Air Force are antisemitic regardless of the speaker’s claims to anti-imperialism. The IHRA examples that flag those moves are useful (IHRA, 2016). The misuse of the same examples to flag any criticism of the current Israeli government as a thought crime is the corrosion that the JDA was written to address.
My working definition, which I will defend below: anti-Zionism is antisemitism when it traffics in classical anti-Jewish tropes, denies historical Jewish suffering, holds Jews collectively responsible for the actions of a state most of them do not live in, or applies a unique standard to Jewish self-determination that no one applies to French or Hungarian self-determination. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism when it opposes a particular ideology of ethnic-religious nationalism on the same grounds one might oppose Hindutva, or Magyar revanchism, or the Christian-nationalist Project 2025 agenda I have written about elsewhere (Hansen, 2026). The line is not always easy to draw. It is also not invisible.
Question Three: Why I Believe Zionism Is Shite
This is the part of the paper where I write the sentences I have been postponing for a year. I am a skeptical agnostic Christian. I take the prophets seriously, I do not take prophecy charts seriously, and I notice that almost every chart depends on real human beings becoming chess pieces in someone else’s endgame. So when the chart belongs to John Hagee and the chess pieces are children in Khan Younis, I have a problem the size of a building.
Here is the moral arithmetic as it stood when I sat down to write. The Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report at least 71,266 Palestinian fatalities and 171,222 injuries between October 7, 2023, and December 29, 2025, with bodies still being pulled out of rubble after the October 2025 ceasefire (United Nations OCHA, 2026). A peer-reviewed Gaza Mortality Survey published in The Lancet Global Health estimated 75,200 violent deaths through January 5, 2025, alone, with women, children, and the elderly making up 56.2 percent of those killed (Spagat et al., 2026). Spagat and colleagues, working from a 2,000-household population-representative survey, found that the Gaza Ministry of Health figures were conservative undercounts rather than overcounts, roughly 35 percent below the real toll. The same survey corroborated the Ministry’s demographic breakdown (Spagat et al., 2026). Estimates of the civilian share among the dead range from roughly sixty to eighty-five percent, depending on how indirect deaths and military-age civilians are classified, with peer-reviewed point estimates clustering near the higher end (Spagat et al., 2026; Wikipedia contributors, 2026g). I write those numbers and reread them. Three out of every hundred people who lived in Gaza in October 2023 are dead. Picture three percent of Sioux Falls, the city where I write this, going into the ground in twenty-six months. Picture the United States Senate voting to send more weapons to the country that did it.
The footprint matches the death count. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that Israel dropped more than 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first six months of the campaign alone, surpassing the combined Allied bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London in World War II (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 2024). Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has described Gaza as “one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns” (Wikipedia contributors, 2026h). Satellite imagery showed at least 69 percent of buildings in Gaza damaged or destroyed (Wikipedia contributors, 2026h). By April 2024, thirty of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals had been bombed, according to Save the Children and UNICEF; by October 2024, only nineteen retained any partial function (Al Jazeera, 2024; Wikipedia contributors, 2026h). The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 87 percent of Gaza’s schools were hit or damaged between October 2023 and October 2024, and all twelve of Gaza’s universities were damaged or destroyed (Wikipedia contributors, 2026h).
On September 16, 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found that Israel had committed four of the five enumerated genocidal acts under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. The Commission concluded that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the totality of evidence (HRC, 2025). The statements the Commission cited as direct and public incitement to commit genocide were on the record. On October 28, 2023, the day the ground operation began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Amalek, the biblical enemy whom 1 Samuel 15 commands the Israelites to slay completely, sparing not “man and woman, infant and suckling,” and repeated the reference on November 3 (Al Jazeera, 2024; HRC, 2025). On October 12, President Isaac Herzog declared, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved” (Al Jazeera, 2024). On October 9, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza with “no electricity, no food, no fuel,” and described the enemy as “human animals” (HRC, 2025). The Commission named Netanyahu, Herzog, and Gallant as having engaged in direct and public incitement to commit genocide. It is recommended that the existing International Criminal Court arrest warrants be amended to include the crime of genocide (HRC, 2025). Amnesty International had reached the same legal conclusion in December 2024 (Amnesty International, 2024). Human Rights Watch followed nine days later with its own report on Israel’s deliberate water-deprivation campaign (Human Rights Watch, 2024). The International Association of Genocide Scholars passed its resolution in August 2025 (IAGS, 2025). The International Court of Justice has had provisional measures in place against Israel under the Genocide Convention since January 26, 2024, has ordered them strengthened twice, and Israel filed its counter-memorial on March 12, 2026, after two extensions (ICJ, 2024; ICJ, 2026). South Africa is the lead applicant. Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Mexico, Ireland, Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Libya, the Comoros, Egypt, the Maldives, Turkey, Chile, and Paraguay have filed declarations of intervention (ICJ, 2025; ICJ, 2026). Fifteen states. The genocide finding serves as the documented consensus of the international human rights apparatus.
This is what I mean when I say Zionism, as currently practiced by the State of Israel, is shite. The word is precise. It denotes something that smells, that has been excreted from the body politic of a movement that lost its moral footing somewhere between Plan Dalet in 1948 and the bombing of Al-Shifa hospital, and that the rest of us are supposed to step around and call by polite names. I am out of polite names.
My argument has four planks, which I will set out plainly, since the topic invites equivocation, and equivocation is what allowed two and a half years of bombing.
