The Current Criticism of Israeli Zionism Is in No Way an Antisemitic Hate Crime

Rastafarianism is way of life and culture born out of the African communities brought to Jamaica to be treated as slaves by the Spanish over the 18th century.

This belief system emerged from the synthesis of the Bible’s Old Testament, African millennialism and Marcus Garvey’s early 20th century political ideology of Pan-Africanism, which involved the return to the continent of Africa.

In popular culture, Rastafari are known for their dreadlocks, their penchant for reggae music and their use of ganga, or cannabis, as it’s considered a sacred herb that’s used for spiritual purposes.

But as enslaved and impoverished people in Jamacia, some of the mainly West African exiles identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament, as their plight appeared to mark their own, and Rastafari came to understand that they are the true descendants of the Israelites.

Rastafari consider they will one day return to the promised land known as Zion, which in their belief system is the continent of Africa.

So, this is a form of Zionism that has nothing to do with Israelis, Jewish people or usurping the land and committing genocide upon the multifaith, majority Muslim Palestinian people of Palestine. And it doesn’t consider that Africa is terra nullius, or a land without sovereigns, as the continent is full of people whom they would be returning to join communally with.

And as the political thought of Garvey, a strong influence upon Rastafari beliefs, was Pan-Africanist, the vision of returning to Zion is not one based on settler colonial conquest, as that’s what actually led to their displacement in Jamacia, as their ancestors were kidnapped and taken there by force.

Yet, due to the current clusterfuck the Albanese government has unleashed upon the public since the genocide broke out in Gaza early last October, which has involved a conflation of criticism of Israel or its version of Zionism with antisemitism, an individual who critiques Rastafari Zionism might be deemed as acting in a prejudicial manner towards Jewish people.

“Iron like a lion in Zion”

In the Old Testament, Zion is the easternmost of two hills of ancient Jerusalem, which was the site of a Jebusite city captured by David, king of the Israelites, in the 10th century BCE and was then established as the royal capital, as Britannica tells it, and this centre of the kingdom was known as Jerusalem.

The name Zion predates the Israelites, a group of semitic speaking people, who inhabited a part of Canaan during the Iron Age, or between 1,200 and 600 BCE. The word itself appears in the Old Testament 152 times as the title for Jerusalem. However, the name Zion carries spiritual overtones, while Jerusalem does not.

Yet, after a 30-month siege on Jerusalem, the city fell to the conquering Babylonians, circa 586 BCE, and enslaved the Israelites, who were forced to leave the land of Palestine and were taken to Babylonia.

According to Psalm 137 of the Bible, the Israelites could not forget Zion, whilst being oppressed in Babylonia, and it expresses this through the mystical lament for Jerusalem: “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion”.

And in Jeremiah 3:14, God or Yahweh orders the Israelites to return to Zion, while in 3:18, he seems to imply that it is the land he gave to their “ancestors as an inheritance” and in Jeremiah 31, God lays out that he will “bring them back from captivity”, and everyone will live happily under his watch.

The Zionism that’s doing the rounds

The Zionism that’s copping a lot criticism of late, and is leading to people being threatened with charges of inciting hatred towards Jewish people, is the Israeli form of Zionism, which is a political doctrine that emerged out of Europe in the late 1880s.

Israeli Zionism, founded by Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, seeks to establish a Jewish state through the colonisation of land outside of Europe, as Jewish people in Europe had long suffered persecution from other Europeans, which eventually culminated in the 1940s Holocaust.

In the early days of what became the Zionist movement, another territory was being tossed around as a potential site of a modern day Zion, which was Argentina. But eventually, Herzl determined that Palestine, being the historical site of Zion, would be best placed.

Published in 1886, Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State) argued that due to the ongoing antisemitism that Jewish people were subjected to across Europe, the only solution to cease this oppression was to form a Jewish state.

Herzl argued for the gradual infiltration of Palestine, via the purchasing of land, and, unlike in Argentina, the Jewish people involved in this venture could claim to be sovereigns of the region, where the Indigenous Palestinians lived, because this is evidently spelt out in the Bible.

Many Jewish people do not believe in Zionism. And of late, because the state of Israel is perpetrating a genocide upon the Palestinians living within the enclosed region of the Gaza Strip, these Jewish people have vocally made this clear.

Being Jewish does not require that an adherent believes in the political doctrine of Zionism. In fact, Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism, except that the people who have colonised Palestine to establish the state of Israel are Jewish and the country only extends rights to Jewish people.

Herzl organised the First Zionist Congress in 1897, which led to the formation of the World Zionist Federation. Jewish people from Europe started moving to Palestine, purchasing land, and by 1900, Jews formed the largest population in Jerusalem and were establishing settlements elsewhere throughout Palestine.

This incremental colonisation of Palestine by Jewish Zionists continued, pre-World War I, when the land was considered part of the Ottoman Empire. And during the Great War, with the Ottomans aligned with the Germans, the British promised to return Palestine to the Palestinians in exchange for their support.

Yet, in 1917, two years prior to the war’s end, UK foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour produced the Balfour Declaration, which promised Palestine to the Zionist movement. And this was done via Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, and while the document did maintain that Palestinians rights should be upheld, the British were quite well versed in how to usurp other people’s land.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles ended WWI. The League of Nations, a pre-United Nations system, was established the following year, and it issued the 1922 British Mandate, which placed Palestine under UK control, and within it were incorporated the provisions of the Balfour Declaration, so that Zionism could be forged.

The British Mandate lasted until 1947. Over the preceding decades, large scale Zionist Jewish immigration continued into Palestine. And as the violence of colonisation escalated, the UK handed the issue of Palestine over to the UN, which came to a two-state solution.

However, only one state was ever officially established and that was Israel, as it declared independence in 1948, which coincided with the Nakba, whereby the Zionists violently displaced 750,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949, which turned almost half of all Palestinians into refugees.

Israel then waged a war against the Palestinian territories – the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – in 1967, which saw the Zionist state occupying the remaining land left to the Palestinians and this occupation continues right up until the present.

And on the 1 February 2022, Amnesty International declared Israel is running an apartheid system throughout Palestine.

Anti-settler colonialism ain’t antisemitic

Since October 2023, Israel has been perpetrating the Gaza genocide. And the Albanese government has supported the Zionist state to the point where it has conflated anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli rhetoric and demonstrations with antisemitism.

But of course, Zionism and settler colonial Israel has nothing to do with being Jewish. In some ways, it would be like claiming in the 1940s that being anti-Nazi or anti-German domestic and foreign policy was prejudicial towards Christians, as Germany is a predominantly Christian country.

To this end, Australian PM Anthony Albanese appointed an antisemitic envoy last month, and it just happens that this Jewish individual also happens to be a vocal Zionist, as well as a supporter of the state of Israel, and she’s added her name to statements rejecting to bring about an end to the Gaza genocide.

So, right now, in Australia, the authorities are cracking down on those speaking out about the most heinous atrocity since the 1940s Holocaust, by maintaining that opposing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, crimes against humanity and the violence of settler colonialism are all anti-Jewish acts.

To that end, prominent Palestinian activist Hash Tayeh has been accused of inciting hatred against Jewish people by Victoria police for speaking out against the genocide, while NSW premier Chris Minns amended this state’s hate crime law.

Section 93Z of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) contains the offence of publicly threatening or inciting violence on grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex or HIV/AIDS status. And it’s a crime that carries up to three years prison time.

Yet, clearly, the expression of antigenocide sentiment or decisive criticism of the political settler colonial doctrine of Zionism or speaking out against the US Democrats for funding the genocide or saying nasty things about the Chinese Communist Party is not captured under this law.

Terra nullius

But one question remains. Where on Earth would Herzl, living in the latter half of 19th century Europe, get the idea that settler colonialism, colonisation or propagating the pretence that a land is empty in order to justify settling upon the region of another people was a kosher idea?

Well, it just so happens that the major powers in Europe, especially Britain, France and Spain, had been in the habit of taking over Indigenous peoples land, via the use of genocide for about 400 years, when it suddenly occurred to Herzl that colonisation was an appropriate tactic to take. And the Nazi perpetration of the Holocaust 40 years later, certainly proved that Jewish people in Europe were in danger and under threat.

At the time the Portuguese and Spanish commenced the 500-year-long European colonisation of First Peoples’ land by force, the pope of the Catholic Church issued a series of papal bulls, or decrees, between 1452 and 1493, which became known as the Doctrine of Discovery.

And this political doctrine released by a religious authority sets out that European Christians are able to acquire lands that are deemed empty, even though Indigenous peoples live there. And this was possible as the documents assert that non-Christians are nonhumans and, therefore, are unable to own land.

The Doctrine of Discovery led to the establishment of such nations as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, to name a few.

And today, this political outlook has lost most of its Christian trappings and is simply referred to as white supremacism and Zionism appears to be a derivative of that.

Christian Zionists

And then there’s the Christian form of Zionism, which sees around 20 to 30 Zionist Christians to every one Jewish Zionist living in the United States right now. And these are the Evangelical and Pentecostal-type Christians, who believe that the Jewish people must return to Zion, the promised land, for their own Christian salvation.

“Christian Zionism is actually the dominant form of Zionism,” British theologian Stephen Sizer told TRT World earlier this year. “It has been since before the Zionist movement emerged in the 1870s, 1880s – there were Christians calling for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine from the 1820s.”

Hayovel: Volunteer in Israel is a US Christian Zionist organisation that facilitates American Christians in travelling to Israel and helping with the colonisation process that continues on Palestinian land, as these extremist Christians consider the Jewish people must be restored to the Holy Land as God promised.

According to Christian Zionists, Jewish people need to forge a modern day Zion to bring on the rapture, which was a concept popularised by UK Anglican clergyman John Nelson Darby, when he travelled to the United States in the late 1870s.

The rapture is an eschatological, or end of times, doctrine that some evangelicals hold to, which considers that when the second coming of Jesus Christ occurs, both the living and the dead believers will ascend to heaven, while everybody else will burn in hell.

For Christ to return three conditions must be met, and these are that the nation of Israel must be established, Jerusalem must be a Jewish city and the Temple of Jerusalem must be restored. And as to what happens to Jewish people at the time of the rapture, well, they’re smote if they don’t believe in Jesus.

Indeed, the politicians that are referred to as the Christian Right in this country and in the United States often believe in the rapture, and in turn, the propagation of Zionism in Palestine.

A large majority of Donald Trump’s supporters adhere to this belief system. And good mates, former CIA director Mike Pompeo and the immediate last PM of this country Scott Morrison are hoping for the rapture to come on soon.