Emmaia Gelman
When the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) launched in 2023, three of our founding ideas seemed to especially enrage Zionist critics. The first was that the study of Zionism belongs to a wide range of studies of power and experience, rather than to Jewish studies and Israel studies. The second was that Zionism should be studied as a power structure, mobilized by ideas, institutions, and actors, and leveraging material resources like capital and armies. The third was that we oppose Zionism: understanding Zionism as a project of racial and colonial domination, we are not undecided about whether it should be abolished. The past year of expanding genocide in Palestine and dystopian repression of the transnational movement to stop it has re-presented Zionism as a colossal material force for dispossession, death, and the erasure of fact. But this is ongoing. For the century beforehand as well, Zionism was a rationale for so much conquest, dispossession, and death in Palestine that to study Zionism without centering Palestine would be nonsensical: methodologically unsound and completely unethical. In the United States, where most of ICSZ’s collective members are based, Zionism is also a central force. Through institutions, culture, and capital, it shapes U.S. life, from the technologies that define the experience of our days to how we conceive of identities like race and queerness. To study Zionism as if it were contained in the state of Israel, or even in Palestine, would mean turning away from a major body of evidence. To do that would be to avoid studying Zionism or sabotage the project.
Critical study of Zionism has been underway for a century, and one of its key insights has been precisely that Zionism sabotages knowledge. There are multiple ways to sabotage knowledge about Western supremacism and colonialism. Edward Said describes the staged construction of a backward “Orient” that is so complete that knowledge cannot penetrate it; the Land Back movement describes the normalization of settlement that renders decolonization unimagined; Saree Makdisi describes the process in which Western liberal discourse affirms that colonialism is a historical injustice, and by explicitly refusing to account for Palestine in that affirmation, denies the colonization of Palestine. Zionism’s particular sabotage works by leveraging ideas that are affectively powerful in liberal democracies — like the worry that it may be “antisemitic” to discuss the history of European Zionists’ explicit plans to colonize Palestine and drive out its non-Jewish inhabitants. Materially, it works through institutions that produce an infrastructure of laws and policing around such ideas. The names of those institutions gesture to Makdisi’s affirmation: they include the Anti-Defamation League, Stand With Us, Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and a quickly expanding field of similarly-named organizations whose work is to demonize resistance to genocide, and to deny genocide.
Since 2016, the IHRA definition of antisemitism has been a tool for this tactic: a refusal that declares history and evidence off limits and punishes trespassers — or criminalizes them as civil rights violators, or deems them “terror supporters.” For instance, the IHRA definition declares that comparing Israeli policy to Nazi policy is a violation of Jewish rights. So, according to IHRA, we are not to consider whether Israeli soldiers’ painting Stars of David on mosques they have demolished and burned bears meaningful relation to Nazis’ destruction and desecration of synagogues. To even raise such a query makes the questioner “like Nazis.” And indeed, as the ICSZ launched, the pundits who habitually attack Palestinians and other critics of Zionism denounced Critical Zionism Studies as a Nazi-like undertaking. As the Gaza genocide proceeded, proposals for IHRA laws in Congress and IHRA policies on campuses increasingly sought to activate punitive violence. Bills have proposed to deport immigrants if they are so much as charged (but not convicted) with a crime at a protest deemed by authorities to be antisemitic, and to defund public universities that do not impose the IHRA definition on campuses. Many universities have implemented policies disallowing political speech, and set out to evict and deport students found in violation of those policies. Some have enacted policies declaring “Zionist” a protected identity.
In the year leading up to the ICSZ’s launch, our colleagues in Critical Zionism Studies agreed that the IHRA definition was, at present, the embodiment of attacks on knowledge about Zionism. Study is our simplest, sturdiest tool for resisting such attacks. So on October 13 and 14, just days after the bombardment of Gaza had begun, we held our first conference, “Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism.” If the atmosphere of the conference was defined by the shock of Israeli brutality in Gaza, the research and the spaces of the conference were electric. In that transcontinental gathering of academic and activist thinkers, we used the tools of critical study to investigate how the IHRA definition constructs power and power’s subjects, and how it reproduces its logics even in contexts where IHRA is not named. The conference’s work has radiated into organizing spaces and study; it helps ground our resistance to the genocide. This journal is the culmination of that conference, and an enactment of resistance to the repressions of the IHRA definition. At the same time, it is a testament to the hope we place in Critical Zionism Studies. Building on the last hundred years of work in this field, we are building new knowledge institutions that refuse to be detached from our collective liberation.