Tag: Zachary Foster

Zionism is Imploding

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By Zachary Foster, a response on Twitter to someone equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism

Hi, I’m Jewish. Many of my closest friends are Jewish. I love them all. My whole family is Jewish, I love them all too. My community is Jewish. Love them all. I love Judaism. I host shabbat dinners, celebrate Jewish holidays, sing Jewish prayers, study Torah & Talmud, and love Jewish culture, history and expression.

But I’m not a Zionist. Zionism was an ideology that said, let’s create a Jewish state in a country that’s 97%+ non-Jewish.

That’s why, when Zionists bought land in Palestine from the 1900s-1948, they uprooted the people living on the land because they weren’t jewish.

That’s why, when Zionists created cooperatives in Palestine in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, they insisted on “Hebrew Labor”, i.e., “Jews only” — no Arabs allowed. That’s why, in the 1930s, Zionists expelled Palestinian Arabs from working at Jewish companies and business. Jews only! https://jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2007.36.2.25

That’s why, in 1948, Zionists militias ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. That’s why, from 1949-1956, Israeli forces shot & killed b/w 2,700-5,000 overwhelmingly unarmed Palestinians trying to return to their homes after the war. Because they were the wrong religion/ethnicity (source: Benny Morris, Border Wars, p.416). That’s why Israel expelled another ~30-40,000 Palestinians from Israel from 1949-1959. https://palestinenexus.com/articles/israel-ethnic-cleansing-1949-1965

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The Origins of Modern Zionism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

This is Zachary Foster’s response to a tweet from Emily Schrader that said, “I’m not sure why this needs to be said, but we don’t need non-Jews to be lecturing Jews about what Zionism is or isn’t.” Foster is a Jewish-American historian of Palestine who received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 2017.

Of course, Christians don’t need to be lecturing Jews about anything. We have our own intramural issues – and Christian Zionism is a big one that heavily influences conservative and liberal followers of Jesus.

Zionism was initially a Christian phenomenon before it was a Jewish phenomenon.

→ Anthony Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) (1801-1885) published a tract in 1838 claiming that Jewish “restoration” in Palestine would benefit Great Britain’s geopolitical position and would hasten the second coming of Jesus.

→ Charles Henry Churchill (1807-1867) proposed a plan for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine in the 1840s as British Consul in Damascus.

→ James Finn (1806-1872), British Consul in Jerusalem, member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, bought land in the 1850s in the Palestinian village of Artas for the purpose of employing destitute Jews there.

→ James Bicheno’s (1880) “The restoration of the Jews, the crisis of all nations”: purpose to “stir up public attention to the prophecies which relate to the restoration of this singular people in the latter days.”

→ William Hechler an Anglican clergyman in 1884 wrote “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine” in which he argued that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a precondition for the return of Jesus.

Maybe the more sensible question is, why did Jews hijack the idea of Zionism from non-Jews?

Sources: Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism; Masalha, The Zionist Bible

It’s As Simple As That

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An excerpt from Ismat Mangla’s AnalystNews interview with Zachary Foster, a historian and Rutgers University senior fellow. The full interview is well worth reading multiple times. You can follow Foster on Twitter here. In this excerpt, Mangla asks Foster about what made him move away from the Zionist beliefs.

I grew up in a very “exotic” suburb of Detroit, went to Jewish schools, Jewish summer camps, Jewish youth groups — all of which were Zionist. I went to Israel as a study abroad student in undergrad. That was the beginning of my transition from Zionist to non-Zionist to anti-Zionist, getting exposed to what day-to-day life was like for Palestinians in Jerusalem.

You don’t go from a Zionist household to speaking out publicly, frequently advocating for Palestinian human rights, overnight. It’s a process. 

When I discovered that Palestinian Americans — who identify strongly with Palestine, whose parents and grandparents are from Palestine — are not allowed to go move to or visit Palestine, while I — an American Jew who may speak zero Arabic or Hebrew, who may have zero family in the country, who may literally not be able to identify it on a map or even ever heard of it — have a right to claim citizenship because I’m Jewish? Does that make any sense to you? That’s insane. That was a real lightbulb moment for me, meeting Palestinians and understanding the trauma of  ’48 — and understanding that while I have rights there, they don’t. 

The more you study Palestinian history and Israeli history, the more pro-Palestinian you become. You can’t study the history of Zionism and not be horrified. It’s as simple as that.